The Kid from Simcoe Street: A Memoir and Poems

by James Clarke, Roy McMurtry (Introduction)

Overview

In this frank and moving memoir, the author recalls growing up in a poor and alcohol-ridden neighborhood of a small city before and during World War II. Following his experiences after the war, the narrative relates the shattering of his mother’s dreams and his own inability to bridge the gulf between himself and his alcoholic father, casting a dark shadow over his childhood. The account reveals how the protagonist never permitted his rocky beginnings to affect his hope for the future, portraying his survival in a bleak environment and of the early road traveled in becoming a man of honor, reputation, and respect as a judge of the Superior Court of Ontario. Also featuring a diverse selection of the author’s poetry, this anthology reflects not only the author’s experiences on the bench but the empathy and compassion for the underdog that he learned while growing up on Simcoe Street.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781550962604
Publisher:	Exile Editions
Publication date:	06/01/2012
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

James Clarke is the author of Dreamworks, Forced Passage, How to Bribe a Judge, L’Arche Journal, A Mourner’s Kaddish, The Raggedy Parade, Silver Mercies, and The Way Everyone is Inside. He is a former Superior Court judge and his judgments have been published extensively in legal journals. He lives in Guelph, Ontario. Roy McMurtry (Introduction) is a former Ontario chief justice, attorney general, and Canadian high commissioner to the United Kingdom. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

A TWO-STORIED, RED-BRICK TERRACE DIVIDED INTO THREE TENEMENTS

For the first 18 years of my life, 249 Simcoe Street was my precarious foothold in a world turning increasingly cold and hostile. As a child I had a powerful urge to locate myself, to affirm my place in the universe. As with most children, I was the centre of my own world and, like many, my schoolbooks bore the inscription:

JAMES HENRY CLARKE
The downtown where we lived was a few city blocks bounded by George Street on the east and Aylmer on the west. Almost anything you needed, from furniture and cars to groceries, was within walking distance, and groceries could be delivered to your doorstep free of charge. The CNR tracks ran along Bethune Street, only a few feet from our tenement. The train would start up at the old station a block away, and as it chugged forward the engine would hiss, the large piston rods churning faster and faster as the train rumbled through our intersection, clanging and belching clouds of steam, the slatted railway cars rattling. I loved to stand beside the tracks and listen to the four blast whistles (long, long, short, long) warning drivers to stay clear of the intersection, and allow the acrid-smelling steam to envelop me, lost in billows of cindery smoke, powerful and invisible like my radio hero, Lamont Cranston in The Shadow. In the dead of night, the thunder of the freight cars shook the floorboards of the tenement, rattled the walls and rocked my bed. I pictured the orange glow on the sweaty faces of the firemen shovelling coal into the belly of the beast. Sometimes, I'd hitch a ride on a side ladder of the evening train and hang on for a block or two before jumping off.

Home was a two-storied, red-brick terrace divided into three tenements, ours in the middle. Built before Confederation, the window frames were askew and fissures gaped in the flaking brickwork. Each tenement had a rusty tin-roofed shed and a small dandelion-choked yard at the back, surrounded by a dilapidated wooden fence.

Mom's clothesline teetered across the yard. Before the York Trading Company bought the land beyond the fence, it belonged to Nelson's Coal and Lumber Company, and the air reeked of coal dust.

Simcoe Street was cruel to beauty. Each time Mom planted flowers in the earthen strip in front of the tenement, the blooms and the low green metal fence she erected to shield them would get trampled flat. Even the canopy of soft green lace the elms at the corner of Aylmer and Simcoe made in the spring didn't last.

I had a recurrent dream about the yellow fire hydrant in the boulevard in front of the tenement. In my dream, water was always gushing out its sides, flushing sidewalk, street and gutters clean of grit and grime, bestowing a lustrous red sheen on the battered tin fence of Pinkus's scrap yard across the street.

The front door opened into a dark hallway with a large kitchen at the end. Off the hallway on the left, as you entered, was Mom and Dad's bedroom, and on the right a small parlour where an upright piano stood under a coloured portrait of a gentle-looking Jesus with pierced feet holding his bleeding heart. Next to the kitchen was an unheated room we called the summer kitchen, with an unpainted, splintery wood floor, which served as a laundry room and general storeroom. A trap door in the floor at one end of the room, with an embedded metal ring you had to pull to lift, led down a rickety stairway to an earthen cellar lit by a single naked bulb. In its dank and dark recesses Mom stored her preserves on shelves, and one time she trapped a rat the size of rabbit at the open end of a broken sewer pipe near the front wall.

Three drafty bedrooms and a small bathroom comprised the upstairs.

After the war, Dad brought home a large wood panel from the bar at the Empress that the hotel had thrown out, on which a journeyman artist had depicted in oils a lake scene in the Rockies, and hung it upstairs in the hall beside my bedroom. I was starved for beauty and the painting enthralled me. I loved to trace my fingers over the hard edges of the paint, the ridges of snow-capped mountains, pines, cattails, and shoreline, marvelling at the wizardry of the unknown artist.

The tenement had no furnace, only a wood stove in the kitchen and a potbelly coal stove in the parlour, with a stovepipe suspended by wires that ran upstairs through a hole in the ceiling. Freezing winter mornings, my breath appeared in puffs of white vapour and I'd snuggle under the blankets, blinking in my pyjamas, dim-witted from sleep, to stay warm till Mom or Dad fired the stoves. The lacework of frost on the windowpane captivated me. Though it shot cold shivers through every nerve of my body and made me wince, I loved to scrape my fingernails across its exotic ferns and flowers.

Dad considered our tenement a castle; Mom called it a pigsty. Mom was the chief breadwinner; Dad only allotted half his earnings to the household. She'd make invidious comparisons to the "nice detached home" that Tommy Kingdom had bought for her sister Marie on Stewart Street, a few blocks away. Dad was impervious to her pleading. Extending his hands like Moses, he'd proclaim, "Ach, go on with you, Florie. We've got everything we need right here." To which she'd reply, "This place is no Buckingham Palace, no matter what you think, Sammy."

Simcoe Street offered myriad diversions to fire a boy's imagination. It was there I got my first inkling of the power of music. The chords of Mantovani's rendition of the traditional English folk song "Greensleeves," which came undulating over the airwaves regularly Sunday evenings, moved me to tears, untied the knot of anger inside me.

Not only was the tenement close to the three movie theatres downtown – the Regent, the New Centre and the Capital – the neighbourhood embraced a fire hall, the railway station, a Salvation Army temple, a synagogue, a Chinese hand laundry, and three scrap yards. Pinkus's yard across the street, piled high with used car parts, twisted pipes, old boilers, rusty girders, large flat slabs of steel slurred with rust, and mountains of old magazines and yellowing newspapers, which reeked of damp and decay, lured us to wiggle through its wooden gates to play war games, cops and robbers, hide-and-seek among the heaps of junk. The jaws of the giant metal cutter held me in awe; not even the hardest metal could withstand its powerful bite. Sunday summer evenings, the Salvation Army band would assemble outside the temple up the street, and the sound of bassoons, cymbals, tambourines, horns, drums and trombones reverberated through the soft twilight. And behind our tenement rose the square brick tower of the fire hall where the firemen dangled the wet hoses like spaghetti to dry. In the deep-shadowed fold between day and night I'd hear the muffled clang of horseshoes, see the firemen's cigarettes flare in the horseshoe pit at the side of the hall.

What I most vividly remember is the scrim of neon light after the war above the downtown skyline shimmering in the dark, the darkness alive with the hum and honk of traffic, snatches of laughter and conversation carried on the breeze and, occasionally, the faint bark of a dog or the wild lung of an ambulance. And most memorable of all, the pee-ent, pee-ent of the nighthawks in the inky sky. I'd hide under the blankets and listen to the thump, thump, thump of my heart, a beat so relentless and unwavering I imagined I was being stalked by a stranger, convinced that if he ever caught me my heart would stop forever.

CHAPTER 2

A FADED POLAROID

I was the oldest child in the family and had two sisters, Shirl, and Marilyn, known as Babe, the youngest. Recently, I visited my sister Babe at her home in Mississauga. She sat beside a tall glass cabinet crammed with expensive designer dolls; there were so many the cabinet couldn't contain them all. They spilt out onto the floor and mantel. She must have noticed my puzzlement. Apologetically, she said, "As a child my greatest dream was to own a china doll, but Mom couldn't afford it."

She took a sip of coffee and after a long pause added, "You know, I don't have many good memories of Simcoe Street and I hardly remember Dad at all."

Babe is a big woman with a round open face and the strong bones of her "Norn Iron" ancestry, except for the eyes, which are large, blue and soft like Mom's. Her eyes began to tear up. "But I do remember the time just after the war when he got mad because I'd gone out with the Booth boy against his wishes. He'd taken off his belt to whack me and you stopped him, grabbed his arm and yelled, 'Touch her and I'll kill you.'"

"I don't remember that."

"You did, Jim, you did. And I remember the day we went to Jack Lundy's to choose his casket. Tears were running down Jack's cheeks and you said: 'You must have really loved my father' until Jack told you he had a defective tear duct and might have to have an operation.

"And the day of the funeral, remember?" she went on, "so hot and sunny."

"I thought it rained."

"It was hot and sunny, because none of us could stop laughing in the limousine as Dad's army buddies carried him out of the church, hot and sweating, and Dad's old drinking pal, Jack the undertaker, kept opening and shutting his mouth like a turtle, a sure sign he'd dried out and needed a quickie."

"The poor driver must have thought we were crazy, carrying on at our father's funeral like that," I said.

Babe's first marriage, which was unhappy, had ended in divorce. Her second husband was good to her, but had died young. She has two grown-up children who are close to her.

"I get angry when I think back to Simcoe Street," she said. "Gabby was a sicko. Today they'd have charged her for what she did."

Gabby was the housekeeper Mom hired to help take care of us during the war while Dad was overseas.

"She treated you and Shirl better than me," Babe went on, "and Shirl lapped it up, as if it was her right."

"For Pete's sake, Babe, Shirl's dead, let bygones be bygones," I said, surprised to hear myself repeating an expression Dad had always used when Mom got bitter and dredged up his past transgressions. As far as I can remember Shirl and Babe had had a love-hate relationship. Babe was obese and shy while Shirl was daring and loved the boys. In her teens, Shirl was one of the best jitterbuggers in the city, so good other dancers would clear the floor of the Brock Street Arena to watch her. Shirl, like Babe, married twice and had three children; two daughters by the first, and a boy by the second marriage. Tragically, her second husband also passed away prematurely at 55. Shirl died of cancer of the cervix in her mid-40s. Babe never got over it.

"She asked me to forgive her before she died," she said, her eyes moistening. "You didn't know that did you?"

"No."

"Well, it's true."

Shirl's death had walloped me, too. When I got the news at the cottage, the deck shimmied beneath me and I almost keeled over.

After a pause Babe said, "You owe me, too."

"What do you mean, owe you?"

"Well, you got all the breaks."

"What breaks?"

"You went to university and escaped," she said, "and now you're a judge."

"You could have escaped also, but chose to quit school," I reminded her. "Remember the nuns begging Mom to keep you in school? But you, pigheaded, refused."

"That doesn't matter, you still owe me," she said, a mischievous half-smile on her face.

"Okay, if it'll make you feel any better I'll take you out for dinner tonight," I said. "That'll do for now," she said. "But I'll choose the restaurant."

Babe brought out a large cardboard box of Mom's old photographs. We sifted through them for a long time and I picked out a faded Polaroid that someone had taken of Dad at work in a ditch on Aylmer Street when he was with Hydro; he's squinting at the camera, thick red hands cupped over the handle of a spade, a pile of earth in the background. He looks sweaty and ill at ease. To pedestrians, he could have been an old stump rooted in the earth. Dust covers his yellow hard hat, checked flannel shirt and baggy green work pants, erasing the sharp lines from his face. I showed Babe the photo. "He looks like a ghost."

We searched everywhere through piles of old Kodak shots but one picture was absent: we couldn't find a family photo of Mom, Dad, me, and my two sisters together. It doesn't exist.

Our conversation opened a tap inside me, led to a flood of forgotten memories. The week of Dad's death I'd gone on a fishing trip to my aunt Palma's lake in the High Laurentians, near Ste-Veronique. The morning after my arrival, I was observing Minoune, Palma's pregnant old yellow cat as she prepared to give birth in the screen porch. She lay down in a wooden box and rolled over on her side like she was about to nap. As five shiny sacs slid out, Minoune chewed through the umbilical cords, which were tough as old leather. By early afternoon, a mass of breathing fur clung to her belly. Then Palma punched holes in the bottom of a large yellow margarine container and filled a large pail with lukewarm water. After putting Minoune outside, she gently lifted the newborn kittens one by one and laid them in the yellow container. Then she lowered it into the pail. Placing the lid on the container, she set a stone on top. "I always say a little prayer before I do this," she said, glancing back as she descended the stairway to the basement. "They make my dahlias grow." The phone rang. It was Mom, she was sobbing.

"Your dad's dying," she said, "you'd better come home right away if you ever want to see him alive again."

All the way back I felt terrible that I had left so hastily and had not stayed with Mom and my sisters, the people I love, during Dad's last days. After a five-hour drive, I finally reached the hospital and spied Mom, bleary-eyed with grief, in the corridor outside Dad's room. I knew I'd arrived too late. "Your father passed away fifteen minutes ago," she said. We hugged each other in the corridor a long time.

When I entered Dad's room alone, the venetian blinds were half-closed, the room stuffy and eerily quiet. A beige plastic curtain surrounded the bed. I could hear the thumping of my heart. Guilt and regret roiled inside me. Mostly it was anger, anger at being absent when I was most needed, anger at the hospital for not saving his life, and especially anger at him.

All my life I'd been cheated of a father and now I'd been cheated by death. Who would I find behind the curtain? I tried to pray. I took a deep breath and yanked open the curtain. Yes, it was Dad, a husk of his former self, diminished, wasted, but him: gaunt and sharp-boned as though all the excess of his hard living and restless spirit had been removed, leaving a younger version of himself, a look of unshakable serenity – something he never possessed in life. I stroked his hands; they were still warm, but the skin was already beginning to cool. For a long time I gazed at this passionate Irishman who was my father, no longer flesh and blood, now an icon of clay, and felt a deep sadness for my mother, my sisters, and especially for him and me – for all the might-have-beens – the gulf we'd never been able to bridge. Later, at the Little Lake cemetery, as they lowered his coffin into the ground, I picked up a spade, dug into the pyramid of crumbling earth and scattered a few shovelfuls, the earth bouncing and rattling on the shiny top of the casket. Overwrought, I imagined the casket had no bottom, and I remembered the old gypsy saying: You have to dig deep to bury a father.

(Continues…)

---

Excerpted from "The Kid from Simcoe Street"
by .
Copyright © 2012 James Clarke.
Excerpted by permission of Exile Editions Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Introduction,
Part One: FIRE HALL BOY,
A Two-Storied, Red-Brick Terrace Divided into Three Tenements,
A Faded Polaroid,
Get Movin', You Dogans, or You'll be Late for Mass!,
Later, I Promise,
Dad Was Lucky that Day,
Hero,
Dileas Gu Bas,
Part Two: THE WAR THAT NEVER ENDED,
Stupid War Games,
A Gentle Push into the Water,
A Chair over the Trapdoor,
Lift Harder for Those Who Can't,
An Intoxicating Feeling of Power,
Of Fedoras and Fudge,
A Hole in the Bottom of the Hat,
About Horses,
Who Says Life Is Fair Anyway?,
A Warning,
We Are All Joined Together,
Something's Wrong at Home,
But Don't Say I Didn't Warn You,
A Kiddle-dee-dyvy Too, Wouldn't You?,
Nightmares of the Carnage,
A Gutter Wound,
Part Three: FLYING HOME THROUGH THE DARK,
He Seemed Like Someone Else's Dad,
My Sisters and I Exchanged Glances Mutely, But Did Not Move,
Skirmishes,
Angrier than I'd Ever Seen Him Before,
The Smashing of Her Dream,
The Booze and Music Melted Hearts,
The Green Hornet,
Eyes Glazed, Gait Wobbly,
Florie, Let Me In!,
Not Even a Postcard,
With a Scream in My Heart,
So Smooth, Almost Like Water,
All I Was Trying to Do Was to Say Somethin' Nice,
Out to the World,
This Quality of Mercy: Editing James Clarke's Poetry, by Bruce Meyer,
SELECTED POEMS,
Palm-in-the-Hand Story,
Villanelle,
The Steeple,
Heart's Needle,
Judge's Prayer,
The Quality of Mercy,
Last Caravan to Damascus,
The Scary Thing,
Act of Mercy,
Chekhov's Journey,
Great Blue Heron,
Please Write Soon,
The Quarry,
How to Bribe a Judge,
Slow Waltz,
A Judge's Progress,
A Sad Tale,
Satori in Surin,
The Mingling,
Ode to the Passenger Pigeon,
Prayer for Travellers,
Death Row,
Palma Has Beautiful Dahlias,
The River,
Home,
Minnows,
The Mystical Foundation of Authority,
Relic,
Variations,
Angel of Justice,
What the Judge Failed to Mention,
Tribal Customs,
Twentieth-Century Love Song,
Night Execution,
How to Build a Modern Bird House,
The Way Everyone Is Inside,
Permanence,
While you were sleeping,
"How-to",
Silver Mercies,
The Fire,
Dreamworks (1990),
Thin Man,
Judges,
Revenant,
Most of the time,
Ice Storm,
Report from the Judicial System to the Public,
Don Juan en Repos,
Going Home,
Shamanic Cure for a Dry-Souled Judge,
Sunset,
Kiss me,