My early childhood was spent on a farm. I was born in 1940, abandoned by both of my parents at the age of 6 months. My grandmother brought me to a family who lived on a farm. It was supposed to be a temporary situation but it was 19 years before I saw my mother again. I grew up in a family of roughhouse boys and I was 6 years old when a foster sister was born to my foster parents. We lived on a farm in a very rural area, no running water, no hydro and a wood burning cookstove and a coal burning heater were used to heat the old farmhouse. We had very little money but we never went hungry. I remember attending a one-room school comprised of grades one to eight and walking home in the winter during a blizzard over frozen fields of snow, to come home to the smell of supper and the heat of the kitchen, finding a corner behind the cookstove to sit and warm up and yes to day-dream. The kitchen was lit by a coal-oil lamp which we were never allowed to touch. Other lamps were placed throughout the living room and the upstairs bedrooms.
In the winter time, the mailman delivered the mail using a horse and cutter. The road was never plowed during winter and it would be late spring before we could ever get our car ( a model T) down the road and eventually down the lane to our farmhouse. To get groceries in the winter, my foster father would hook up a team of horses to a large sleigh and we would all climb on board for the trip into Blackstock, about 5 miles. Once we got onto the main road, a narrow road, we would sometimes encounter a car and although horses are supposed to have the right of way over vehicles, my foster father would always take the initiative and back up the team to a place where the car could get around us. Not easy to do, backing up a team of horses attached to a large sleigh.
In the summer time, we kids would always go barefoot, (see picture at top right) shoes were expensive and it wouldn't be until school started up again in September that we were faced with having to wear shoes again and go through the agony of blisters. The only time I injured myself going barefoot was when I ran down the middle of our laneway and stepped on a wasp's nest in the ground that was covered up by long grass. I did get stung quite a bit but my foster mother just took me down to the barnyard and packed mud on all the stings. It must have worked because I can't recall any adverse reaction to all the stings other than they were sore. During summer we kids had to help out on the farm, particularly during haying season and threshing season. When the oats and wheat were ready to be threshed, a team of workers hauling a thresher would go from farm to farm until all the farms had finished bringing in the wheat or oats. This meant preparing three large meals per day beginning with breakfast, not unusual to have to cook for 10 additional people, lunch was called dinner and consisted of potatoes, meat, vegetables and home-made pies. Dinner was called supper and consisted of the very same assortment of foods as for dinner (lunch). But all meats prepared came directly from the farm, same as the vegetables and fruit for the pies. The odd vegetable may have come from a can but most of our food was produced on the farm. We did not have a tractor so our fields were plowed using a team of horses, a matched dapple grey, called Prince and Tiny. Hay was raked and stooked using a pitchfork and I hated this job because oftentimes a big old garter snake would fall from the stook as I tried to pick up the stook to put it on the haywagon. The only way to get the hay into the barn was by using a pulley with a rope attached to a fork, then you would pull on the rope, once the fork had sunk into the hay wagon and up the hay would go, through the trap door near the roof of the barn and then once in the barn, you would release the fork by pulling on the rope and the hay would drop into the mow. The hay mow in the barn would be piled high with hay and I would watch in awe and a bit of fear as my foster brothers would ride the pulley fork across the top of the hay mow from one end of the barn to the other. They always got into trouble for doing this.
We had another horse on the farm who was old and blind so didn't do much work. He was very gentle and we would hook him up to a stonebolt (a contraption resembling a sleigh by using 2 logs as runners and then tying a heavy stone at each end of the runners and placing planks between the runners) and he would take off down through the fields as if the devil was chasing him, bouncing us kids off the stonebolt. The horse, although blind, always seemed to know where he was going...waiting for us further on down in the field like he was laughing at us.
