Inland Navigation by the Stars. Anne Coleman

exotically born in Africa and thus part of our parents’ life there, the stuff of so many stories. It didn’t occur to me she might have envied Carol or me. Yet in a picture I have of the three of us taken when Ruth was almost fifteen, Carol eleven, I nine, Ruth looks self-conscious, unhappy and rather plump. Though we are sitting on the dock, she is wearing a dress and I now remember that she never wore shorts that summer. Carol and I both are adorable tomboys, tousle-haired, skinny and entirely unself-conscious. Carol even seems to be wearing a pair of our father’s boots. It’s difficult to believe Ruth can’t have been bothered by her contrast with us.

      Relationships among sisters, especially during an intensely sexist era, are at the mercy of the currents that swirl and suck at them. I picture a river with rapids and whirlpools. There are also meanders that can feel temporarily safe for one sister, while another swims strongly out into the swifter water. It is difficult in the tumult to be sure where one is oneself, let alone where the other sisters are. Sometimes it takes a person her whole life to take the necessary breaths. Yet sometimes, as adults, Ruth and I could suddenly be close and that could last even for a few years. They were precious times when our interests and senses of humour clicked perfectly. They made the reversals all the more painful. I am very glad that one of our longer, usually inexplicable (at least to me) feuds ended before Ruth died. She died unexpectedly and it would have been terrible for me had she gone at a time of our being out of touch. Whatever was happening at any given time, if ever she turned to me, I was ready to love her. The sister bond is indestructible, really.

      As for Chuck, our “baby brother,” despite my early jealousy and even while feeling it, I always loved him and still do. And I think his extreme importance to our father was more difficult and hampering for him than mine as youngest girl was for me. My nose was sometimes out of joint but I was allowed far more freedom and independence. My father’s compulsion to indulge and overprotect his son was quite understandable and forgivable but it took me until after he was dead to see it really clearly: he had to make up for, as best he could, his own father’s cruelty to and neglect of him.

      Parents are simply human beings.

      What a totally obvious fact! Yet I had to let the sentence stand alone, for even as a young woman and no longer a child I didn’t grasp it. I don’t know that I even tried to. I don’t think any of us did. Our parents still seemed to have so much power. Yet it was crucial for our adult happiness, and crucial for our love of them, to see and to accept them as fallible and vulnerable human beings. They behaved as they did often for deep and unconscious reasons just as we did, and as I probably still do. They loved us all and they did their best. And they were of an era when most people didn’t yet question age-old hierarchical family roles.

      But the power they had is interesting to contemplate. I don’t see parents today having it, an authority that is automatically assumed and accepted. It was just part and parcel of the patriarchal construct, and a mother, as stand-in authority when the father was away, partook of it as well. Yet our parents were essentially gentle people. I can’t remember a serious punishment. As a child I certainly wasn’t frightened of them. I was never spanked. There could be crossness — though never shouting; I remember a bad moment on one of the endless two-day drives to North Hatley from Toronto. Our father had to pull over and stop the car — a dark green 1936 Buick with running boards that we had for years; I loved that car: it was a member of the family, the exact same age as I — and attempt to slap the kicking legs of Carol and me who were fighting much too uproariously in the backseat. I don’t think the slaps even connected and I strongly suspect he felt guilty for them afterwards, it was so rare for him to lose his temper. Generally our parents enjoyed us. We took that for granted. They loved to tell us stories, and both had lively senses of humour.

       2

      Happiness was by far the reigning mood of my childhood. There was a balance of order and fun. Ours was a household in which someone was usually singing, someone drawing, someone climbing a tree, someone reading — or several of us doing one of those things together.

      I was extraordinarily fortunate. I have friends of my generation who were small children in Europe during the war. One survived the firebombing of Hamburg, another, German but living in Latvia, fled bombardments with her family over and over again, across one border or another, wanted nowhere. They discovered their father, whom they had lost sight of for five years, in the Displaced Persons queue beside theirs, in Denmark. Another close friend, exactly my age, was on one of the trains to newly created Pakistan at the time of the Indian Partition. Almost his entire extended family was massacred by machete before his eleven-year-old eyes. Another friend was on HMS Athenia, the first ship to be torpedoed, September 3, 1939, right after World War Two began. She, her parents and her brothers were among the saved. (Their dog perished.) My friend was three years old, fevered with whooping cough and bundled into a pitching and tossing lifeboat. Of course I knew nothing of these other children when I was a child myself.

      For my part I had the supreme luck of being born to parents who loved each other and their children dearly and, crucially at that time, we lived safely in Canada, safe, that is, if one’s parents were middle class and of Anglo-Saxon background. Other people who much later became my friends spent childhood years in an internment camp for Japanese-Canadians, or, if First Nations, in a residential school. Later Jewish friends had family members who were trapped and perishing in a real-life nightmare. At the time, I have to say, despite the war, there was very nasty anti-Semitism in the Toronto of my childhood. I know this now. Then, it was taken for granted. Carol and I once were chased home from school by a gang of boys shouting “dirty Jews.” Our curly hair apparently had created the confusion. We were frightened and felt an unfairness too. We weren’t Jewish. I’m not sure we got the point of how much worse it would have been if we were.

      As for us, we lived in a new house, built for us not long before I was born, in Forest Hill, an affluent neighbourhood of Toronto. Our house was typical of the area: of stone and brick, it had pretend-Tudor timbering and was large, though certainly not a mansion. We thought it a wonderful house. The back yard was perfect for childhood games, with shrubbery to hide in and enough space to run in, and a particular bush with nicely springy branches from which Chuck and I cut our bows and arrows. The front lawn featured a maple tree in which Carol and I spent countless hours, high up in a green world hidden among the leaves. And Forest Hill was villagey in certain ways: milk and bread were delivered daily by horse-drawn wagons so the streets had daily deposits of manure and a pleasant country smell. Mr. Kroll, a stout vegetable man with very little English and a small truck, rolled slowly through the neighbourhood stopping every block. A knife-sharpener, on foot and ringing a bell, pushed a large flint wheel ahead of him and aproned housewives ran out with carving knives and scissors. The mailman was called Postie and everyone knew him. Cars were few so we played our games of kick-the-can and tap-the-icebox on the road and when snow arrived used the road as a sleigh hill. Forest Hill today is grander and the street life of the 1940s is ancient history.

      In the summers we drove in the Buick to North Hatley, a small Quebec village on the north end of Lake Massawippi where our father had spent a few childhood holidays with his mother’s much richer sister, his Aunt Emmy. Those visits gave him some of his few happy memories of childhood, so from when Chuck was a baby that was where he took us every June until school began again in September.

      ~

      We arrive at the end of a hot day. It has been a very long car trip. We stopped the night before at some cabins with a very smelly picannini kaya — our family always uses those words for outside toilets and we hate them though we like the African words — and today Carol and Ruth have both been carsick and Daddy has to stop the car each time and wait while Mummy and whichever sister it is this time get out and Mummy holds her head as she crouches over. I try not to look. I hate to see the sick. If I do it will make that water come into my mouth which means the sickness will happen to me too. I stare hard out of the other side of the car. Whichever sister it is is always crying as she gets back into the car and I squeeze over away from her because I hate the smell. They suck barley sugar because Grandma says it helps but I don’t like the disgusting way it doesn’t really taste of anything. But I never get sick so I don’t have to have any. Chucky