In September 1951 my mother and I left for Winnipeg on the train to register me for the second year of the Arts and Science programme at the University of Manitoba. We stayed with my grandparents who lived on Jubilee Avenue and took the bus out the Pembina highway to the campus where I registered for French, which was mandatory, Botany, Zoology, Chemistry and English which was also a requirement. I also was registered for the university residence. My mother bought me a maroon corduroy jacket and tan colored trousers with three white shirts and a tie. There were probably other bits and pieces but that is all I remember. To be honest, I was removed so far from my mileau that week that the cocky assurance I always carried in my little hometown of Lestock had melted away. Whatever hope that I had for blending in had totally disappeared and I was simply swept away with the torrent of people, rules, feelings, confusions and decisions.
I had turned 17 in June of that year and my dad suggested that a good job for me would be a brakeman for the CNR railroad. The pay was good and because my dad was a railroader, a station agent, our life was seen as a good way to make a living . I had gone to Melville, the terminal for our area and was `examined by the railroad doctor to see if I was healthy enough for the railroad to hire me on as a brakeman. He said, “ Drop your pants and bend over”, and he stuck his finger up my backside. I was confused but assumed this was part of being a brakeman and was OK. In retrospect now I wish I could ask him why he didn't give a 17 year old a little forewarning, or counsel, but since I've just turned 81, he would be probably 141 years old and not answer.
I was not to be a brakeman. My mother wrote to her father, my grandfather and her twin sister, a doctor in practice in Connecticut and told them that my marks in grade 12 were good and asked them for financial help to allow me to go to university. It was not easy for her to do that, but she was looking at her own life, living in railway stations, making do, keeping her family of boys together, often on the move. It wasn't that she didn't know any better as she had been in the same university residence I was scheduled to live when she became a teacher in 1926 and knew that knowledge and the ability to impart it is a wonderful thing. My grandfather sent me two thousand dollars and my aunt a thousand dollars which was my turning point. I had lived with my mother at my grandparents for three years during the early thirties while my father traveled to earn a living, so we were close and I was named Darcy after his nickname, acquired after Mr. Darcy, Jane Austin's prototype of a dandy of yesteryear. That wasn't me at that time.
Lestock, my little town in Saskatchewan was every thing I needed at that time. School, friends, baseball, hockey, family, supremely happy, wrenched from this to culture shock, anonymity, incompetence, loneliness and loss of identity. Small town boys, perhaps more so me, took a long time to become acculturated and then it may not have been all that useful. It took me a year to get grounded. I lived in four different places, scholasticly struggled , barely passed everything and longed for home. I made friends with the equally troubled whose maladaption was equivalent to mine but at least I recognized that distancing was useful. I learned one thing however, I wouldn't repeat the screw-up the following year. If I was to get into medicine the next year, my pre-med year had to be good. I had to jettison my maladapted friends, accept that to study is lonely, but to learn is joyful. I studied six nights a week and celebrated on the seventh. My marks were good. I was awarded an Isbister Scholarship and got accepted into medicine.
The summer before Grade twelve and my mother took me to Winnipeg, I worked in the Pool elevator across the tracks from the railroad station cleaning out the elevator shafts in preparation for the new harvest to come. The chaff of oats, wheat, and barley was three to five feet deep in the bottom of the shaft. Dirty dusty jobs like that taught you two things. Three things really. The third thing was you needed to bath every night to get rid of the dust balls in your hair, eyes and ears and had to carry the water from the town pump in order to heat it for the bathtub in the kitchen. And what was one ?--- that you didn't want to do it forever and two, that you weren't good enough then to do anything else. Learning to be a brakeman seemed a good idea at that time. Things are relative!
I had turned 17 in June of that year and my dad suggested that a good job for me would be a brakeman for the CNR railroad. The pay was good and because my dad was a railroader, a station agent, our life was seen as a good way to make a living . I had gone to Melville, the terminal for our area and was `examined by the railroad doctor to see if I was healthy enough for the railroad to hire me on as a brakeman. He said, “ Drop your pants and bend over”, and he stuck his finger up my backside. I was confused but assumed this was part of being a brakeman and was OK. In retrospect now I wish I could ask him why he didn't give a 17 year old a little forewarning, or counsel, but since I've just turned 81, he would be probably 141 years old and not answer.
I was not to be a brakeman. My mother wrote to her father, my grandfather and her twin sister, a doctor in practice in Connecticut and told them that my marks in grade 12 were good and asked them for financial help to allow me to go to university. It was not easy for her to do that, but she was looking at her own life, living in railway stations, making do, keeping her family of boys together, often on the move. It wasn't that she didn't know any better as she had been in the same university residence I was scheduled to live when she became a teacher in 1926 and knew that knowledge and the ability to impart it is a wonderful thing. My grandfather sent me two thousand dollars and my aunt a thousand dollars which was my turning point. I had lived with my mother at my grandparents for three years during the early thirties while my father traveled to earn a living, so we were close and I was named Darcy after his nickname, acquired after Mr. Darcy, Jane Austin's prototype of a dandy of yesteryear. That wasn't me at that time.
Lestock, my little town in Saskatchewan was every thing I needed at that time. School, friends, baseball, hockey, family, supremely happy, wrenched from this to culture shock, anonymity, incompetence, loneliness and loss of identity. Small town boys, perhaps more so me, took a long time to become acculturated and then it may not have been all that useful. It took me a year to get grounded. I lived in four different places, scholasticly struggled , barely passed everything and longed for home. I made friends with the equally troubled whose maladaption was equivalent to mine but at least I recognized that distancing was useful. I learned one thing however, I wouldn't repeat the screw-up the following year. If I was to get into medicine the next year, my pre-med year had to be good. I had to jettison my maladapted friends, accept that to study is lonely, but to learn is joyful. I studied six nights a week and celebrated on the seventh. My marks were good. I was awarded an Isbister Scholarship and got accepted into medicine.
The summer before Grade twelve and my mother took me to Winnipeg, I worked in the Pool elevator across the tracks from the railroad station cleaning out the elevator shafts in preparation for the new harvest to come. The chaff of oats, wheat, and barley was three to five feet deep in the bottom of the shaft. Dirty dusty jobs like that taught you two things. Three things really. The third thing was you needed to bath every night to get rid of the dust balls in your hair, eyes and ears and had to carry the water from the town pump in order to heat it for the bathtub in the kitchen. And what was one ?--- that you didn't want to do it forever and two, that you weren't good enough then to do anything else. Learning to be a brakeman seemed a good idea at that time. Things are relative!
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