They Left Us Everything by Plum Johnson Page B

gang of boys much older than himself, he’s obviously bright and loaded with potential. He just needs to be redirected!” She thought nothing of inviting whole families to live with us if they were temporarily homeless, and one single mother with two young sons, whom Mum had befriended in England during the war, moved in for almost a year.
    Our house overflowed with little boys—Mum seemed always to be pregnant with them—and she often had them on some kind of leash. At my grade two Christmas party, I remember other mothers being dropped off at the school wearing stylish tweed coats with little mink collars, and thin rubber boots buttoned over their pumps. But Mum believed in exercise, so she had walked, massively pregnant again, trudging through the deep snow wearing oversized galoshesand a mammoth white Borg coat that came down to her ankles. She looked like a polar bear. Around her middle she’d tied a long piece of yellow rope, and my two younger brothers clung to the ends like little farmers attached to a clothesline, trying not to lose sight of a barn in the blizzard. On her head Mum was wearing her brown leather World War II pilot’s helmet, earflaps down, chin strap dangling in the wind. She had dressed for what she considered was the main occasion— not the party, but the cold—and I was mortified. But Mum was practical and provocative. She challenged convention every chance she got. She didn’t give a damn .
    The days of our week had a prescribed rhythm, defined by chores and meals. In our family, Sundays were for church, roast beef, and country walks; Mondays for grocery shopping and shepherd’s pie; Tuesdays for clothes washing and chicken; Wednesdays for ironing and spaghetti; Thursdays for vacuuming and liver; Fridays for silver polishing and fish; and Saturdays for gardening, floor waxing, and dinner parties. There were no popular restaurants—parents created their own.
    When we weren’t in school, we children ran in packs with our unleashed dogs, into one house, out another, banging open screen doors, grazing in open kitchens, and briefly greeting other mothers who were in the middle of baking cookies or hanging their sheets out to dry. We wiped our hands on their aprons. Our parents didn’t see us from dawn to dusk. We had the run of the town. Before the advent of television, we entertained ourselves. In the spring, my brothers and their friends wore toy guns in holsters and leather chaps over their corduroys, stringing up stuffed animals with clothesline nooses and exploding dead fish with firecrackers. My friends and I dug clay from the banks of Lakeside Park to make pottery, and wentdown to the pier at night to watch the local Portuguese fishermen with their glowing lanterns scoop up nets of flapping smelt. In the winter when the creek froze over we learned to skate by pushing chairs over the surface; in our garden we built elaborate snow forts complete with connecting tunnels, flags, and arsenals of snowballs.
    But Saturday mornings were different. This is when neighbourhood children scattered and watched from afar, morbidly fascinated by our father—and grateful he wasn’t theirs. Dad had so many lessons to teach us that he could barely cram them all in. He never gave us a task without inspecting it afterwards. He checked the flatness of our sheets after we made our beds, our fingernails after we washed our hands, the shine of our shoes after we polished them, our toy cupboards after we cleared up. He was always making us memorize poems and copy out maps, and correcting what he called our “lazy English.”
    “Stop saying ‘Um’—think before you speak! … It’s not ‘yeah’—it’s ‘yes’! … It’s not ‘nope’—it’s ‘no’! … ‘Kids’ are baby goats—the word is ‘children’!”
    Saturdays were allowance days—when our chores expanded, but when we might also get paid. Dad kept a homemade ledger, called the “Wowance Book” by Victor, who was only two years