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Great Writing - Home > Non-Fiction > Tell us a Story Moma -part 2
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Non-Fiction
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| Tell us a Story Moma -part 2 | |
| By jean.day | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 28 February 2007 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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I started writing this for children, and putting in comments from my children as I read it to them. But several people thought it was more an adult sort of story, so I will post it here from now on and skip the children's bits. I wrote this in about 1978, meaning it to be read by my children eventually. Our neighbourhood had a few children, but we had one set of good friends, Nadine and Donnie Martin. They lived in the basement of the not-yet-finished house just down the hill from us. There were very poor and Mother didn't like them much. We did play with the Martin children a lot. Nadine was year older than Judy and Donnie was my age. The first and best remembered spanking that I had came because I went off with the Martin children to visit some cousins of theirs called the Mosbrukers who lived a distance away. I never considered asking if I could go or told anyone where I was going, I just went. When I returned, still not realising I'd done anything wrong, I got a hard spanking which I felt was most unfair. After we lived in the country for awhile, we sub-let part of the house to a young couple who had trouble finding anywhere to live. They were John and Margaret Fox. They had the living room and spare bedroom. I used to dress up my paper dolls and slide them under the swinging door to show Mrs. Fox how nice they looked. We like having them there. One day I was playing with a coffee tin which had a very sharp top rim and I cut my hand badly and a sizeable piece was nearly cut off. I also had a gash in one finger. John Fox helped a lot in the emergency, holding me in his lap and rocking me and staying with Judy while I was taken to the hospital to have stitches put in. When we were playing with the Martin children, we sometimes went down into the fields where there was an abandoned boxcar with a ladder up the side which made it tern ping to climb onto the top. I was scared to do it, but Nadine and Judy were much braver and crawled all over it. Outside our house was a wood pile which was an eyesore but provided a great play house. We even had a toilet in one old wooden box, finding the trip to the house just too much trouble sometimes. There was also a vegetable patch were Chet tried very hard to produce vegetables. The land is poor and the weather was too hot in the summer and nothing much grew. We had an old car which ran sometimes but not very often. Once when I went to the Martin house, Mrs. Martin noticed that my nose was running, and I didn't have a hanky. So she gave me a piece of clean rag to blow my nose on. I used it, but I was so insulted. Nadine like catsup sandwiches best, but Judy preferred them with only mustard on. I thought they both were horrible. No meat or cheese, just catsup. We also had an old wind-up record player. Kathleen had a favourite record called the Toreador Song. For some reason we called it "a cup of coffee". One day when I took it to play on the little record player, I dropped it and it broke. Kathleen was so angry with me. Kathleen played the piano very well. She had a book of songs that she used to play and we would sing with her. The favourites were "You take the High Road, and I'll take the Low Road, and I'll be in Scotland before you" and "I dream of Jeanie with the light brown hair". Our most favourite one went like this, "I'm off to my love with a boxing glove 10,000 miles away." We used to sing it well and were quite happy to sing it for anybody who was silly enough to say they would like to hear us sing. But as Judy was upset by me being as tall as she, she would stand on a Ward's catalogue whenever we sang, to give the proper effect befitting her age and superior status. Another song went like this "I'm going home, and home I will stay. Never oh never again will I go wandering far away." One incident that I don't actually remember but that was often talked about was when Judy cut her finger by putting it into the broken neck of a bottle. She went into the house crying and dripping blood. I went to see what she had done, so stuck my finger into it too, and the same thing happened. Judy had long hair which was quite thick and somewhat curly. Mine was lighter brown and straight and stuck up all over. But for awhile my hair was long enough to put into braids. Sometimes we'd put our braids up on top of our heads like Kathleen wore hers. But one time Judy decided that she thought I should have a haircut, so she picked up one braid and cut it off at the base. Naturally the effect wasn't too good, and after that time I never grew my hair long enough for braids. When we had a special occasion, like when we had our pictures taken, mother would put our hair in rags. She would take an old rag and tie it at the bottom of a hank of hair and then rolled it up and tied it again the top. It made very hard work of sleeping and when we gratefully took out the rags in the morning, we had lovely ringlets, or at least Judy did. My hair still stuck out, but was curly at the same time. Because our garden was such a dead loss for growing anything, Dad rented a piece of land in town. It was called a victory garden. Dad often took us with him when he went to hoe or plant and we took the trike along. One Sunday, Judy was pedalling the trike down the sidewalk outside the victory garden and I was riding on the back. I took my hands off to wave to Daddy and fell over backwards and got very hurt. Dad carried me all the way home, which was probably over a mile, and carried the trike and gardening tools as well. When we got home, he decided that my collarbone was broken because of the way my arm just hung down limp. He took me into the hospital for an x-ray. When a month or so had elapsed, we had to go back to the clinic for another x-ray. But by this time it was nearly healed. But the silly doctor thought he should put it in a sling anyway, only he put the sling on the wrong arm. I didn't tell him of course. Judy had a scar too - on her leg. She was walking along and caught it on some barbed wire. It made a long lengthways scar on her leg. Kathleen said that when Judy grew up and wore nylons she would always look like she had a run in her stocking. And that was true. We went with our parents to church each Sunday and looked forward to the day when we would be big enough to go to Communion. We liked to play going to church and had round flat candy is that we always used as Communion. I'm sure Judy always got to be the priest. She was always the boss and she dominated me to a large extent. But I probably felt grateful that I was allowed to play with her at all.
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