Dear Canada: Hoping for Home

by Kit Pearson

  I’ll keep you posted.

  Love, Miriam

  September 15th, 1947

  My dear Sister,

  I found the letter and read it. I am copying it onto the pages of the diary, because if I don’t I will never be able to face the truth.

  I cannot believe what is written here. I only want to believe that by some miracle, you are somewhere listening to me …

  Dear Jan,

  I will come straight to the point.

  I have investigated your daughter’s disappearance and came up with following facts.

  I am afraid, my dear friend, that your daughter, Katya, is no longer with us.

  After someone informed on her, the Gestapo came to the house next door to inquire about her. She slipped through the back door and away from the people who were hiding her. She ran into the forest, where she joined a group of Polish Partisan fighters. They took her in, gave her a gun and even at her young age, she was shooting at the enemy. After a few of their attacks on Nazi spies in the village, the partisans were found and shot by Nazi soldiers.

  Your daughter died honourably defending not only the people of Poland but fighting the cause of the poor persecuted Jews.

  I am sorry to have been the one to tell you this. If you ever come back to Poland, the members of that group are buried in the village cemetery where Katya lived with the people who generously offered to hide her.

  My dearest Kati, I am numb. It’s as if I stopped being. When I read what the letter was saying, a terrible feeling seized me, as if a heavy shroud was settling over me. I cannot imagine what happened to you and how you must have felt — so threatened by the enemy. My dream of ever seeing you again has died, but not my dream of remembering you as you were, my beloved sister and friend.

  For that, I have your photo in my mind-album, safely tucked away in the corner of my soul. From there I will always think of you. Now more than ever I need to keep on writing to you in hope that I can hear your spirit whispering in the silence of my heart.

  One day I will write about you and me and all of us, for the world to know what people suffered and are still suffering, so that children and young people will never again stand in the line of fire between two countries.

  I cannot write any more, my beloved sister.

  Always yours,

  Miriam

  Growing up in the Gatineau Hills, BRIAN DOYLE listened to his father and his father’s friends telling tall tales and stories. It was the Depression, then World War II, then the years after the war when fears of the atomic bomb loomed large. Many of Brian’s novels are set in and around Ottawa in the time of his own boyhood.

  Brian enjoys stories that let the reader figure out what’s between the lines. “The world we encounter doesn’t give itself up to us all at once,” he has said. And not all arrivals are geographical — they can play out on an inner landscape as well …

  Entrance Certificate

  Penman’s Journal

  Ottawa, Ontario

  July 1948

  July 1st, 1948

  Building No. 14

  Unit Two

  Uplands Emergency Housing Shelter

  Uplands Airport Barracks

  Ottawa, Ontario

  Dear Dad:

  The other night I heard Mom and Phil in the bedroom having a big fight and breaking the alarm clock against the door and swearing and yelling about you.

  I felt like going in the bedroom with a chair and smashing Phil’s face, but I couldn’t because I’m afraid of him.

  Then yesterday I saw Mom writing at the kitchen table. When she heard me come in she hid the paper under a placemat. Then she tried to get rid of me, telling me she wanted me to go across the parade square to the canteen to get some milk and eggs. Just then someone came to the back door and told Mom there was a phone call for her and when she went out in the hall to the pay phone I peeked at the letter. It was to you. I couldn’t read much of it because Mom was coming right back, but I saw your address written on the back of an envelope so I stuck it in my pocket. Mom saw me and started to cry.

  When she was done crying she made me show it to her and said I should copy it down and write you a letter.

  So that’s what I’m doing now, obviously.

  But I don’t know what to say.

  She said I should tell you how I am and what I’m doing.

  I’m fine.

  I’m not doing much.

  I was planning on telling you that I don’t remember what you look like, except for some old photographs from before the war.

  When I want to think about your face, I look in the mirror. They say you look like me. Or I look like you — which ever way it goes.

  When I look at my bare feet they remind me of Mom’s feet. When I go swimming down at the sand pits I look at my bare feet in the sand and think of Mom.

  When I look at the mirror and see my face, I think I’m thinking of you.

  I’m trying to figure out how many years …

  You probably know this but I’ll be fourteen this coming August.

  You probably know this too, but you always forget my birthday.

  This letter is not going very well.

  That is about it.

  I’m usually a better letter writer than this.

  signed, Penman

  P.S. I just thought of something. Do you love me?

  signed, Penman

  P.P.S. I just got an idea. I’ll send you some of my journal. Maybe it will tell you how I am and what I’m doing in this (like my English teacher always says) the Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Forty-Eight.

  signed, Penman

  SOME OF MY JOURNAL

  Before Christmas holidays my teacher, Mr. Ketcheson, said that if I didn’t try harder and be more “scholarly” I was going to fail English. And if I failed I wouldn’t get my “Entrance Certificate” and I wouldn’t be able to go to high school and then university and be a big success in life like a doctor or an engineer or something.

  And that I would be a bum all my life and end up in reform school or even jail and have as my best friends extortionists and axe murderers and end up being hanged by the neck until I am dead.

  Or wind up charged with committing forgery like I did with Sibyl Vane’s absentee note.

  Sibyl bummed school one afternoon and went to a show at the Rathole with a guy who goes to high school and is a big-time basketball star called Stretch “The King” King. Mr. Ketcheson says it’s rude to call a nice movie theatre like the Rialto, the “Rathole.” (I guess he’s never been there.)

  Anyway, Sibyl couldn’t ask her mother to write the note so she asked me would I write the note and sign her mother’s name. Why didn’t she get Stretch “The King” King to write the note? Because he can hardly write his own name probably. That’s what everybody says about him, anyway.

  It was my English teacher’s fault that I wrote the note in the first place, because of a big speech he always gives us about writing. The speech goes something like this:

  You should write something every day. That’s over and above and beyond what you write in your journal every day, which by the way, is due this Friday as it is every Friday which goes without saying but I feel “behooved” to say it anyway. Let’s say you are writing a note to pin on your door saying you’ll be back in a minute. Put a couple of extra sentences in it. Write long notes to your brother telling what you think of him — in detail. Write a page describing the girl you like. Leave it somewhere where she’ll find it. If you’re shy, sign someone else’s name. Doesn’t matter. As long as you get the practice. Better still, keep all these things. Put them in a file system. Build up a file of daily bits of writing. Write down what you hear people say. Write letters to your friends. Don’t send them. Write to the newspaper. Keep the letters. File them. Write to your dead great-grandmother. File the letter under “L” for letters. Or, better still, under “G” for great-granny.

  Some geese fly over. You hear them. You see them. Write it
down. Three or four sentences. What are they like? Put the geese under “G” with your great-grandmother.

  They send you to the hardware store for a plug. You get the wrong plug. They send you back. You feel stupid. You are stupid. Write it down. How it feels to be stupid about plugs. Put it under “S.” “S” for stupid.

  You feed some sheep at the Experimental Farm. Everybody thinks all sheep look the same. They’re wrong. Sheep look different from each other. You know that. Write it down. One sheep looks like she’s just been told she owes a thousand dollars extra income tax. The next sheep looks like she’s going to cry. The next one looks like he just robbed a gas station. The next one looks like she’s drunk. Write it down. Put it under “S.” “S” for sheep. Practise. Practise …”

  It’s a pretty good speech.

  So it was because of my English teacher constantly telling us to write all the time that I wrote Sibyl Vane’s absentee note for her. She tried to tell me what to write. She said to put: “Please excuse Sibyl’s absence yesterday as she was sick.” I didn’t think that was good enough so I wrote this:

  Dear Mrs. Black:

  Sibyl was so sick yesterday that her head and feet swelled up so that she hardly looked human. The bandages I wrapped around her entire body burst around suppertime and purple pus squirted out. When the doctor finally arrived and saw Sibyl he couldn’t handle it and ran out the door screaming, his hands covering his face … so how do you expect my daughter to show up at school in that kind of shape?

  Yours truly,

  Sibyl’s Mom,

  Mrs. S. Vane

  Sibyl never bothered to open the note and read it over. Sibyl hates reading and writing but she always gets good marks in school. I don’t know how she does it. The reason she asked me to write it for her was that I told her secretly that I liked to write, but not school work writing and not to tell anybody.

  I confided in her because I thought if I did she’d let me kiss her, but it didn’t work. I think she lets “The King” kiss her and probably do a whole lot more.

  Oh, well.

  Anyway, Mrs. Black took a fit and showed the letter to Mr. Black, alias the principal, and I guess he phoned Mrs. Vane and then Sibyl-the-big-suck confessed and down to the office I went. The charge — forgery!

  The two Blacks got me in the office and worked me over.

  ~

  That Mrs. Black, she can cause you to shiver just by looking at you. The kids who have her as a teacher all say that you should never look in her eyes or she’ll hypnotize you. I don’t think it’s her eyes so much, it’s her eyebrows. She has very bushy eyebrows. And they bob up and down when she talks. Nobody can understand why Mr. Black came round to marrying her. She reminds me of a guy in the movies who always plays a homicidal-maniac-Nazi-prison-guard. And her arms are very hairy. She even has thick black hair on her knuckles.

  The Blacks told me that with this kind of behaviour I will never get my Entrance Certificate and go on to high school and instant success.

  And forgery, of course, is a criminal offence and Mrs. Vane is seriously considering pressing charges, having me arrested and thrown into a rat-infested dungeon while I await being hanged by the neck until I am dead — God rest my soul.

  And then of course Mr. Black told my English teacher, and he lied and denied he ever encouraged his students to sign other people’s names to their writing and then he kept me after school and told me about the “horrible consequences” of not getting my Entrance Certificate and “as surely as night follows day” and “without a shadow of a doubt” I was heading for a life of “debauchery” and crime. He said this “without reservation.”

  ~

  I think what I’ll do is quit school and move down to America. I could become a much bigger criminal in Gotham City or Chicago than I can here at Hopewell Public School. I could become a famous bank robber and get gunned down coming out of a movie theatre showing High Sierra starring Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino. Or, better still, I could become a mobster and be sentenced to the electric chair. I’d much rather get juiced in the chair than get choked by hanging.

  I sometimes feel like I’m choking when I’m just sitting in my desk at school, and I have to say “without reservation” that I don’t like the feeling one bit.

  ~

  I like going to the toilet at school because you don’t have to wait. There’s always lots of room. Not like at home. At home there’s usually a lineup at the two toilets, men’s and ladies’. There are benches along the wall where you can sit and wait. If the line is really long, I bring my journal and write in it, like I’m doing now. Not everybody sits down to wait. Some people walk around a lot and squirm. They’re the ones who have to go real bad. The males are worse than the females. They can’t seem to hold it in as well. Mom says that’s because men lack self control. And also, she says, that their bladders are often bursting with beer.

  Mom’s always writing to the “authorities” about how do they expect eight families to get along with only two toilets.

  And about how our building is always too hot.

  And about how there’s people cheating on the shower schedule. There’s a list on the wall by the laundry tubs of when each unit is allowed to use the shower. People are crossing other people’s names out and writing in their own. You’re supposed to be able to take a hot shower every eighth day. When you do get a turn there’s never any hot water anyway. So I don’t bother.

  I usually just go down to the laundry tubs and wet my head and then wait a while and come back.

  It tricks Mom.

  ~

  Riding into Hopewell School (alias Hopeless Public) on the Uplands bus this morning, I wondered if my friends and I stink or not.

  I read in one of Mom’s medical books all about bedbugs and lice. Poor people often have bedbugs and lice. Bedbugs suck your blood at night when you’re asleep. So there’s tiny blobs of dead blood in your bed. When blood goes bad it smells sicky sweet, like rotting corpses. Like death!

  Our gang from Uplands gets on the bus first. For some reason we all sit near the back. There’s usually about 20 of us, adults going to work and school kids.

  Then, along the highway by the Rideau River, the bus picks up the fancy people, the rich people from mansions. They all sit near the front. They’ll stay standing even though there might be empty seats in the middle of the bus.

  There’s always a big gap between the gang at the back and the groups at the front.

  Sometimes, on purpose, I’ll sit in a seat near the front just to see what happens. When I do that, nobody sits beside me.

  I don’t think I stink, but maybe I do.

  ~

  A couple of weeks ago while I was sitting in the bus terminal I felt something against my foot under the bench.

  It was a book somebody dropped. It was called The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. I started flipping through it, trying to make some sense out of it, when I saw a name that jumped right off the page at me like a dog jumping up to lick your face.

  The name was Sibyl Vane! Sibyl Vane was the main girl in the story. Her name was in the book lots of times. Then I saw a part where she was dead. She committed suicide or was murdered. I couldn’t figure out which. She was a beautiful actress. She was Dorian Gray’s girlfriend. And it was his fault that she was horribly dead. Or murdered by him.

  In the front of the book it told what the book was about. There were words like “debauchery” and “corruption” and “sin” and “ruined women” and “labyrinths of iniquitous dens,” “torture” and “opium” and “sadism” and “murder.”

  Poor Sibyl Vane! In a dirty book!

  See, Dorian Gray was a very handsome man, a beautiful man. He gets a picture of himself painted by an artist. He puts the picture in his attic. Then he lives a corrupt, rotten life, but it never shows on his face. He stays young and beautiful. But guess what? It’s the picture in the attic that gets uglier and uglier and more and more horrible.

  Dorian
Gray reminds me of Phil.

  Phil is very handsome. But he’s ugly inside. When he gets mad his face gets twisted up like Dorian’s picture of himself. When he gets drunk his moustache and his nose move around while he’s yelling or telling one of his stupid jokes and laughing like a hyena.

  We’ve got no attic at the barracks so I can’t prove Phil’s got a picture of himself somewhere, but I bet he has. And I bet it’s getting ghastlier by the minute.

  Phil sells new cars. Buicks. He always drives around in a new Buick, but everybody knows it’s not his. Last summer I saw a woman get into his new Buick and they drove away laughing.

  I’m worried about Mom.

  Maybe I’ll tell her the story of Dorian Gray.

  Oh yes. I looked at every page of the book and couldn’t find one dirty part. I guess I don’t know how to read right.

  Where was all the juicy stuff, the corruption and debauchery? I sure couldn’t find it.

  And what were the horrible things he did to Sibyl Vane?

  I wonder if Stretch “The King” King ever read The Picture of Dorian Gray.

  Probably not. I don’t think he can even read his own name. That’s what everybody says about him, anyway.

  ~

  My metalwork teacher, “Flux” Fasken, thinks he’s real funny. Our project in metalwork was to make a sugar scoop out of tin. You trace a pattern on a sheet of tin, then you cut out the pattern with tin snips and fold it all carefully and solder it together. The handle gets made separately and gets soldered on. Flux Fasken took a look at my sugar scoop, started to smile, then his belly started to shake and his face got red. Then he doubled over and started choking and laughing. Then he had to hang on to the cupboard where he keeps his soldering irons to stop himself from falling over. The test for the sugar scoop was this. You fill it with water and if it doesn’t leak, you pass.

  He took it over to the sink and filled it with water.

  It leaked in about ten places.

  “Let’s look at it this way,” says Flux. “You could always take it home and give it to your mother. Tell her she could use it to water her plants with!”