Born Naked

by Farley Mowat

  The Bonter farm, not far from the village of Consecon, was a favourite place to visit in summertime. Elmer Bonter kept dairy cattle and his wife made Devonshire cream. Served with fresh strawberries or raspberries, and topped with dollops of buckwheat honey, this was a dish the memory of which can still make me salivate like a Pavlovian dog.

  I have another memory of the Bonter farm. One day I allowed myself to be dared by the Bonter kids into trying to walk across the farm manure pile.

  Inevitably I broke through the crust and sank into it up to my armpits. When I was pulled out by an irate Elmer, I had lost not only my shoes but my trousers too. Even prolonged immersion in the nearby waters of Lake Ontario, laving myself with home-made brown soap, could not wash away my feelings of humiliation.

  My other companions of those early days are now mostly lost in the mists but I recall a couple with some clarity. One was the son of a local doctor. Now spending his days on a Florida beach like so many Canadian jellyfish, Doug Reid, who witnessed my humiliation at the Bonters’ farm, today complains it was my predilection for running around naked which led him to choose a nudist colony as his retirement residence. He says I had a bad influence on him.

  The other friend was the son of a poacher who lived a bachelor existence in an old boathouse that sometimes went adrift during spring high water. I have forgotten the boy’s name but Helen used to refer to him tellingly as the Marsh Boy. He was a child of few words who generally avoided human company. But we were wharf-rats together when I was five, playing on and under the decaying old steamer docks, in the hulks of abandoned barges, or poling a punt around in the swamps. He led me even farther into the world of the other animals by showing me a bittern’s nest; muskrat houses; the nesting haunts of snapping turtles; giant carp that lay half awash like crocodiles amongst the reeds; bullfrogs; and the thick, black water snakes who lived under his floating home.

  I was enthralled by him and the world he lived in and took him home to lunch one day so I could show him off to my parents.

  He was ill at ease as we climbed the stairs leading to our apartment over the clothing store, and he baulked entirely when he got to our open door. I think he would have fled had not my mother come forward, beaming in welcome, to take his arm and urge him in. She offered him a steaming plate of macaroni and cheese, which he turned down with something very like a snarl. Staring suspiciously at my father through the ragged tangle of black hair which hung over his brow, he backed away from the table, pulled a knotted handkerchief out of his pocket, untied it, and spread a clutch of hard-boiled eggs on the kitchen floor.

  These were not the products of your ordinary domestic hen. One was a heron’s egg; a couple had probably belonged to a hell-diver; and one very large, olive-brown one might have been laid by a gull. While we watched, fascinated, the Marsh Boy systematically cracked each egg against his forehead, peeled off the shell, and gulped down the contents. Having had his lunch, he departed with no further social parley.

  Although I pressed him, he would not again risk his liberty to the confines of our apartment. That may have been just as well since one of his favourite snacks was frogs’ legs. Eaten raw. I doubt if my mother could have handled that.

  Once the sailing season began the Marsh Boy faded from my life. I didn’t see him again until the autumn when we both began attending Grade 1 at Lord Dufferin School. By then I had almost forgotten our close kinship of the spring, but he had not. One day at recess he gave me a painted turtle.

  This was a phlegmatic but indomitable creature the size of a small dinner plate. He was allowed to range around the apartment at will, demonstrating his bulldozer power by crawling under heavy objects such as a coal bucket and sliding them along. To the consternation of a friend of my mother’s, he once slid a basket of washing right across the kitchen floor without ever revealing his presence under it.

  Hercules, as I named him, delighted in joining me when I had a bath. He liked to be on top of things and would stand peering myopically over the edge of our kitchen/dining table for hours, seemingly contemplating the depths of an imaginary pool into which he never quite dared plunge.

  One day just before Christmas he was ambling around the table top where I was busy drawing pictures. Suddenly he gave a cry—a sort of sonorous honk which startled both Helen and me. As we stared at him, “he” laid an egg, shuffled to the table’s edge, and plunged to the kitchen floor. The fall caused no apparent injury but thereafter Herc became strangely withdrawn, even for a turtle. She took to spending most of her time under my bed. She would have nothing to do with the egg, a leathery, lozenge-shaped object, so Angus buried it in a box of moist sand and placed it in the warming closet of our big coal stove. It never hatched, and in the spring we gave the unfulfilled Hercules her liberty in the swamps of her birth.

  As for the Marsh Boy, after the first week or so he failed to return to school. I never saw him again nor, I regret to say, did I make any effort to seek him out. What unconscious cruelty we practise as children!

  Although the eccentricities of some of my pals did not perturb Helen, whose tolerance seemed almost limitless, she did worry that I was, in the words of her younger brother Arthur (who was only six years my senior), such a “skinny little wart.” Certainly my appearance was not prepossessing. At the age of five I weighed only about thirty pounds, had arms and legs that made match sticks seem robust, and balanced a pumpkin head on a neck as graceful and nearly as thin as that of a stork. Kindly people said I looked delicate or frail. Less kindly ones described me as peaked or puny. Heartless ones stigmatized me as a sickly runt—though sickly I was not.

  None of this bothered me in those early days but it did distress my mother. She pestered old Dr. Farncombe for tonics, potions, and procedures which would turn me into a young porker. By the time I was entering my sixth year, he grew tired of her importunities and made an appointment for me to be examined in Toronto by Dr. Alan Brown, Canada’s foremost pediatrician.

  We took the train up from Trenton on a Friday morning and then a streetcar to his office, which was all very hoity-toity, with many nurses in starched uniforms running about. There must have been a dozen mothers with their children, all waiting to see the Great Man, and we joined them. After a very long time, a nurse came and took me into the inner sanctum where I was stripped to the buff and poked and pinched until I was ready to make a bolt for it. I was gone such a long time that Helen had almost given up hope for me. At last Dr. Brown himself brought me back into the waiting room.

  “Who’s Mrs. Mowat?” he cried.

  My mother timidly responded, whereupon he shouted in a voice I’m sure could have been heard all over the building:

  “Well, Madam, what do you mean wasting my time? This boy is as healthy as an ox. As for his size—if you’d wanted a prize fighter for a son you should have married one. Good day to you!”

  4

  ANGUS WAS POSSESSED OF FURIOUS energy, with ambition to match, neither of which had ever been fully unleashed until he was hired to rejuvenate Trenton’s library. Thereafter he dedicated himself to becoming the ideal librarian. He sent for and devoured everything available about what would later become known as library science. He swept through the library stacks like a cyclone, ruthlessly discarding the accumulated literary dead wood of generations. Bit by bit, for money was scarce, he then refilled the shelves with books people would take home and read. Circulation doubled, then tripled. And word got around.

  In the summer of 1928 he was invited to take charge of the Corby Public Library in neighbouring Belleville, and he accepted. Belleville was the county seat and considerably larger and richer than Trenton. So was its library, which even rated a part-time assistant. Apart from the greater prestige which the move brought him, Angus’s salary nearly tripled. We now had our feet firmly planted on the ladder to middle-class success.

  The library building, which had originally housed the Merchants Bank, was
an austere, three-storeyed limestone monument standing on the terraced slope of a hill overlooking the Moira River. A high retaining wall behind the building was full of nooks and crannies which delighted me by providing a lodging house for innumerable birds, mice, squirrels, and snakes.

  We lived in a high-ceilinged, wide-windowed apartment occupying most of the second floor, which had once housed the bank manager and his family. These were by far the most spacious quarters we had yet known and our scanty collection of hand-me-down furniture did little to dispel the illusion of camping in an abandoned automobile showroom. However, the vast interior spaces were great for games of tag or tricycle riding on rainy days.

  Directly across the street from the library stood the ornate brick mansion of Dr. Sobie. There were two children in the Sobie family—Jean, who was a year or two older than I, and Geordie, a dour, dark-haired lad of my own age. He and I soon became pals.

  Behind the Sobie home was a big carriage house. Its lower storey had been converted into a garage but the one-time hay loft remained as a dark and echoing vault full of bats and barn swallows. Geordie and I made this our own private world. One corner of it was cluttered by scores of gallon jugs in brown, green, and dark red glass. These had once contained cough syrups and tonics, bought in bulk and dispensed from Dr. Sobie’s office.4 Most still had their corks in place and it did not take us long to discover that these usually contained a few spoonsful of syrup, either cherry- or peppermint-flavoured. What we did not know was that some of these potions were laden with codeine or other narcotics. On one occasion, after polishing off the residues in a number of jugs, we fell asleep in the loft and were posted as missing for several hours. Our distracted parents never suspected we’d been on a trip. Sometime later Geordie and I got so high on the alcohol which was a major ingredient of most medical elixirs that we were emboldened to squeeze through a ventilator onto the carriage-house roof, from which precarious vantage point we had to be rescued by the town fire department. By then we had begun to suspect that there were strange genii in some of the bottles.

  Jean Sobie gave me one of the worst moments of my early life. Geordie and I were playing ping-pong with Jean and some of her girlfriends on the Sobie porch one hot summer evening in 1929. Suddenly the girls clustered together, pointed their fingers at me, and began tittering insanely. I was wearing very short shorts that day and no underwear. As I leapt about at our end of the table, Jean had caught a glimpse of my penis.

  “We saw your dinkie!” crowed this obnoxious little female.

  I hotly denied it and tried to persuade the girls that what they had seen was the handle of my ping-pong paddle. To no avail. I fled home and my embarrassment was so acute that I stayed away from the Sobie house for days. I don’t think it was outraged modesty that distressed me so. I suspect it was the primordial fear which haunts most men—even when they are little boys—that their organ is smaller than it ought to be.

  Geordie and I often prowled the shores of the Moira River. We were especially interested in the great pipes out of which Belleville’s sewage poured in robust and unfettered spate. Hundreds and hundreds of suckers used to gather below each outlet to gorge on this bounty and we would try to catch them—not, I hasten to add, for the pot but just for the fun of it. The suckers were picky eaters and hard to hook but we could at least always count on fishing out a few condoms.

  We knew these were not balloons but were used in some obscure, not-to-be-talked-about way by our elders. I don’t remember which of us had the inspiration, but one day we took some back to the Mowat apartment. We filled a couple at the kitchen tap with as much water as they would hold—perhaps a gallon—then carried them into my parents’ bedroom at the front of the library. A bay window opened directly over the front steps and from this vantage point the captain and crew of the airship R-100 dropped their bombs.

  The target turned out to be one of my father’s friends, Eardlie Wilmott, a dashing young fellow who owned the local Ford dealership. Minutes later Geordie and I were trying to explain ourselves to Angus and Eardlie, who were sufficiently amused not to punish us, except verbally. However, we were sternly warned never to breathe a word about the incident to anyone, and especially not to our mothers.

  Geordie’s mother was renowned for her sensibilities. She once wrote a note to my father asking him to restrain his son from the use of indecent language. The phrase of mine to which she had taken exception was “I’ll bet my bottom buttons.” Had she heard about the condom bombing, she would have instantly severed all contact between me and her children.

  My mother was, thank God, much more open-minded. The first time she heard me say shit (shortly after I had been enrolled in my new school in Belleville), she did not scold me. Instead, she explained that this was “not a nice word used by nice people. So try not to use it, dear. But if you ever feel you simply must, you could say shite.”

  Not long afterwards I tried her version on an older boy at school. “Don’t you give me none of your la-di-da stuff!” he snorted, and bopped me on the nose.

  Helen was pregnant when we moved to Belleville and early in 1929 was whisked off to hospital for the delivery. This proved difficult and protracted and, in the end, she lost the baby who would have been my sister. One day during my mother’s convalescence I visited her, bringing a bouquet of lilacs I had picked myself. To my perplexity and distress, this caused her to burst into tears. Only later did I learn that the lilacs had been in full and early bloom the week that I was born, and she had believed them to be a token of good luck. Helen continued trying to bear but, after two miscarriages, gave up the attempt to save me from being an only child.

  While she was in hospital, I stayed with my maternal grandparents and their youngest son, Arthur, who had moved to Belleville after Hal Thomson took “early retirement” from The Bank in Port Arthur.

  Hal was an ideal grandad. Humiliated by his fall from grace, he avoided adults but felt at ease with me. A rotund and rubicund little man, he possessed a sweet voice and loved to sing me old songs from his youth. They were terrific songs. One was about a brash young whale: “In the North Sea lived a whale… big of bone and large of tail” who encountered a large silver fish and tried to bully it out of the way. “‘Just you make tracks,’ cried the whale… then he lashed out with his tail.” But “That fish was, indeedo… a naval torpedo… and Oh, and Oh, how that poor whale did blow!” Another had to do with the adventures of an Irish rover called O’Shea who was cast away in India and became advisor to a maharaja.

  He wrote to his sweetheart

  In far off Dublin Bay,

  He wrote to his sweetheart,

  He wrote her just to say…

  Sure I’ve got rings on my fingers

  And bells upon my toes,

  Elephants to ride upon,

  My little Irish Rose.

  So come to your Nabob

  On next St. Patrick’s Day,

  Be-e-e-e Mistress Mumbo Jumbo Jijaboo Jay O’Shea.

  Grandmother Georgina Thomson was a horse of a different colour. She was rangy, long-nosed, and an energetic, skittish, and unpredictable maverick. When Hal’s career ended, George (as she preferred to be called) took control of the failing family fortunes and thereafter ran the show. Nothing daunted her. When she was in her late seventies she learned to drive, bought a red roadster, and drove it to Florida. But back in 1929 she had little time to spare for children or grandchildren. Arthur (of whom she once said, with a disdain for dictionary meanings that was legendary, “Well, my dear, he was an afterbirth, you know”)5 largely fended for himself. In consequence he spent much time at our apartment or aboard Stout Fella.

  Arthur had a diabolical streak, as in truth did all the Thomson boys.6 Left to keep an eye on me while my parents were off at a party, he would devise ways to scare me half to death. Once he told me a really gruesome story about rotting corpses in a cave. He then hustled me into bed
, turned out the lights, and let me stew for ten minutes or so before thrusting the great woolly head of a mop through the open transom above my bedroom door while giving voice to hideous howls, snarls, and screams.

  Next door to the library on the south was a somewhat ramshackle house sheltering a family of five daughters and their mother. The father, a missionary-surgeon, had died in Africa some years earlier. The daughters took an interest in me and I was flattered when they included me in their pastimes. Mostly these seemed to revolve around medical emergencies—with me as the patient. All the girls planned either to become nurses or doctors and I believe most of them did so. I met one in 1944 in Italy where she was serving as a nursing sister in a Canadian military hospital.

  “You were a big help to us in Belleville, Farley,” she told me. “We had most of Dad’s old medical books to study but pictures aren’t enough. We learned a lot from checking you over. You were sort of our own little male cadaver, if you know what I mean.”

  I didn’t learn much from them in return but I did have one unforgettable experience in their house. I was day-dreaming in a swing sofa on their porch when a sudden movement caught my eye. I looked up to see a huge spider in the centre of its web battling an equally enormous hornet. The duel was taking place only a hand’s breadth away, and I felt myself being drawn directly into the world of the combatants and, in some inexplicable way, associated with them. I watched in wonderment as the velvet-clad black spider feinted warily, avoiding the dagger thrusts of the golden hornet’s sting. Suddenly the spider drove its curved jaws—in the tips of which tiny jewels of liquid poison gleamed—into the back of the hornet’s neck. At the same instant, the hornet curved its abdomen and buried its dagger in the spider’s belly. The web, which had been shaking wildly, grew still as death overwhelmed the duellists. And I slowly emerged from something akin to a trance having, for the first time in my life, consciously entered into the world of the Others—that world which is so infinitely greater than the circumscribed world of Man.