windyisle wrote:
- - - Hey Ed. Could you give me some information about growing up in the 40's on the island? I'm doing a grade 12 project and my teacher says it's O.K. to do the 40's instead of the 30's as long as it's someone who grew up here.
Just remembered a piece I wrote a few years ago for a genealogy website I used to have.
Use it, including the pics, if it is of any use to you. I don't think I could come up with much more anyway.
Ed
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Cable Head is located on the north shore of PEI, where it's white sand beaches and rocky cliffs are washed, and often battered, by the waves of the Gulf of St Lawrence. The name comes from a cable that washed ashore from some unlucky ship that was wrecked on one of those rocky reefs.
For days after a storm you could hear the surf crashing onto the rocks from anywhere in the community. My brothers and I spent a lot of time playing with our friends on that shore when I was a kid in the 1940's. Later we worked there, picking Irish moss that we sold for 5 cents per lb after it was spread on the grass to dry for a few days. A feed sack stuffed full brought about $1.00.
We lived on what everyone called the ‘new’ road. Its correct name was the Turret Bell Road, and it was built to facilitate the salvage of a steamship by that name that ran aground there in 1906. This map shows the shoreline, roads, and some of the places that were of interest to me as I grew up there.
This is Cable Head West - the Protestant end of the community. All of the Catholics lived in Cable Head East, which was a separate school district.
Everyone, as far as I could tell, was honest and hard-working because in those days you worked or you didn’t eat. No one locked a door and I never heard of anything ever being stolen.
The people made their living farming or fishing, and some of them, including my parents, did both. When I got to be nine or ten years old I would get to go out in the boat with my father on Saturdays to ‘haul’ the lobster traps. No hydraulic ‘trap haulers’ in those days – it was all done by hand. We literally lived on lobster during the fishing season. I can remember lobsters being so plentiful that hundreds would be washed up on the shore after a bad wind-storm.
Farming was ‘mixed’ in that everyone had a few cattle, pigs, chickens, and laying hens for their eggs. We had our own milk, made our own butter, and had a pig killed each fall for the winter’s meat. No refrigerators (no electricity) so the meat was salted, or if it was late enough in the season, hung up in an outbuilding, on a wire to keep ‘critters’ from getting at it, to freeze by the winter cold. We produced enough eggs, which were sold to the village ‘egg-grading station’ as we called it, to buy the rest of our groceries.
From the time we were ‘big enough’ country kids were expected to do their share of the work. From the age of 8 or 9 our winter jobs were to keep the wood-box full, and at 11 or 12, after school each evening, we let the cattle out to drink at the brook that ran close to the barn. After they drank they’d stand around for a few minutes and then go back into the barn, each into their own stall. Amazing. Then we’d go to the barn loft and put down hay and give the cows and horses their ‘dinner’. We weren’t allowed to water the horses – our father did that.
In summer we were expected to help with the hay and grain harvest, and to pick potatoes. On our farm we grew a ‘rotation’ of potatoes, grain, and hay, but there was always a large plot devoted to turnips, and a large vegetable garden.
My father farmed with horses until about 1947 when one of his cousins who had been ‘overseas’, as we used to say, in WW2 bought a big (for those days) Farmall M tractor and started doing ‘custom’ plowing and cultivating for other farmers. By 1950 almost every farmer had a tractor and ‘horsefarming’ was a thing of the past. The coveted job for a 12 yr old was driving the tractor on slow speed jobs like loading hay or grain onto the wagons.
We didn’t feel exploited. On the contrary, we felt needed and valued, an integral part of the family’s struggle to survive.
By today’s measure, we were poor, but we didn’t know it. We had nothing to compare it to because everyone in the district was ‘in the same boat’. There was always enough to eat and clothes to wear. We kids were warned to ‘go easy’ on our winter boots, however. My mother sent a mail order to Eatons or Sears each spring and fall and you had to make your ‘threads’ last till the next order.
We had fun. From an early age we explored the woodlot, going a bit farther into the dark scary areas as we got older. We built camps, cutting small trees to make wig-wams and covering them with feed sacks ‘stolen’ from the barn, even though we were forbidden to take the axe to the woods. We were also forbidden to light campfires. I clearly remember our attempts to prevent the smoke from being seen by parents and neighbors.
In winter it was skating and hockey. My engineering career started with an attempt to dam the stream by our barn to make a rink. That didn’t work out so well so we spent most of the next summer building a rink in a low spot near the stream, stripping the sod off and piling it around the perimeter for ‘boards’, and rigging up a long wooden trough to transfer water from the stream for flooding it.
There was no electric power in the community, so obviously no electronic entertainment media except the battery powered radio. We listened to NHL hockey, detective stories and comedy shows. It was during the Toronto Maple Leafs’ three-year Stanley Cup winning streak (’47, ’48, and ’49) that I became a Leaf fan.
When we got old enough to want bicycles we had to earn the money. $49.95 from the Eatons catalogue. There was an area of wild blueberries on our farm. We kids picked and sold them, and the Irish moss mentioned above. We picked potatoes for the neighbors for $3.00 per day. We ordered one bicycle and shared it until we got another the next year. When the bike arrived by rail freight it was not assembled, but luckily there were tools included. We got our mechanical career started right there on the railroad station platform, putting the bike together.
Our road did not get snowplowed in the winter, so transportation was by horse drawn sleigh. When we were 12 –13 yrs old, on Saturday nights in the winter after the chores were done and when the weather was fit, a neighbor kid, my next younger brother, and I would walk 5 miles to the village of St. Peters. We’d set up pins in the bowling alley for 5 or 6 games to make a couple of dollars, then bowl a few games, blow the rest of the money on pop and chips, and walk the 5 miles back home. We had the choice of walking in the sleigh tracks, which meant putting one foot precisely in front of the other, in the dark. The alternative was to walk in the horse tracks, which required almost 3 ft long strides. I can remember being so tired I’d have to force myself not to lay down in the snow and go to sleep.
We were privileged to get our formal education in a one-room school, and although it housed Grades 1 to 10, there would only be 10 or 12 kids there at any one time. It had many advantages. We learned the most important lesson of all, which is ‘how to learn’. From that point on one’s progress is not dependant on institutions and teachers, just access to information.
The school had ancient ‘double desks’ that seated two students, and one of the teacher’s constant ‘challenges’ was which students to pair up. Almost every square inch of the desk was ‘carved’ with initials, pictures, and 'graffiti'. I spent considerable time wondering who carved what, and when it was done.
The school didn’t have a pump so the older students took turns carrying water from the nearest neighbor to fill the drinking fountain each day. For winter heat it had a coal stove located in the center of the school. Lucky were the students who happened to be seated near it on cold days. In my grade 10 year I got the job of lighting the fire each morning, supplying my own kindling, and keeping it ‘stoked’ with coal during the day, for which I got paid $75 for the winter. That meant going to school an hour early to get the school warmed up.
There was no ‘indoor plumbing’, just a two-seater outhouse. Winter visits were kept as brief as possible, but in summer I often took a 'break' from the routine boredom by going to the outhouse even if I didn't need to. You could sit and listen to the birds singing and other sounds of the community, or read something interesting from the supply of 'reading material'. 8 or 10 minutes was about the max before they might think there was something wrong and come looking for you.
That school building still exists – as a summer cottage.
The only ‘industry’ in the district was a lobster canning factory that my grandfather and some of his relatives operated for about thirty years, from around 1912 until the early thirties. On the next farm to ours a widow and her son operated a small country store that kept non-perishables like tea, sugar, and ‘baloney’, etc. They also sold the kerosene that we all used in the lamps that lit our homes. Oh, and tobacco and papers to roll your own cigarettes. I think they eventually had ‘ready-mades’ as we called them then.
In the late 40's my brothers and I looked forward to the annual summer visit of these next-door neighbors’ relatives from Boston, who had two kids about our age, 10 - 12 years old. Living in Cable Head in the 40's we were quite isolated from the world, so we were exposed to much new knowledge, some good and some not so good, as we spent the summer playing with these visitors. We learned about movies, television, how to play baseball, and lots of ‘words’ we had never heard before.
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