Chasing the Comet: A Scottish-Canadian Life

3. Quebec

As he was walking up the street, The city for to view, O there he spied a bonie lass The window looking thro’. —Robert Burns, “Charlie He’s My Darling” CHAPTER THREE Quebec This page intentionally left blank I Initially, in 1924 I lived with Mary, Tom, and Oliver in their Montreal duplex. My brother-in-law continued to be a devil, always finding ways to enjoy himself at my expense, just as he’d done at the train station. For example, he took me to dinner in a Chinese restaurant, then guffawed at my reaction when I saw my first Chinamen. When we walked into the restaurant, I was taken aback, I’ll tell you. “Christ, there’s no place in Dundrennan like this,” I muttered. Because I thought the waiters looked so strange, I didn’t trust them, or their food. Tom chuckled all through the meal because— even though I was hungry—I couldn’t bring myself to eat much. The reaction was pure ignorance on my part, of course, and I deserved his teasing. Years later, after working with Chinese at Kelowna, some became my good friends. For the most part, I came to know they were kindly, honest, hard workers. I learned to like the people, but I’ve never learned to like their food, especially after they started making the spareribs red. For almost four years, I lived in the village of Ste-Anne-deBellevue , a town close to Montreal, located on railway lines leading to Toronto and Ottawa. More important to me, it was close to my cousin Bessie (sister to my cousins in Secum, England) and her husband, Bob Johnston. He owned a store in Verdun, where I sometimes visited and helped out on weekends. Note to chapter 3 is on page 239. 25 I was lucky to get the job working on the experimental research farm of Macdonald College at McGill University. Here, entering students who had proven they knew English, elementary mathematics , history, and geography, took training to qualify either to teach school, or to continue and earn the degree of bachelor of science in agriculture.1 I worked for the agronomy department where they were interested in experimenting to find the best dates for planting, rates of growth, methods of seeding and crop breeding: developing new strains of cereals, hay and pasture crops, plus root and corn crops. I also worked for the Department of Animal Husbandry, where sheep and beef were raised, not only to feed the students but also to study animal nutrition, diseases, and breeding. A hundred head of milk cows were maintained, with some of the milk consumed by staff and students of the college and some of it sold and delivered to townsfolk in the village. In Quebec, the only time I ran into trouble because I couldn’t speak French was when I was given the job of delivering milk to one of our good customers, the wife of a store manager. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t understand what she wanted and eventually I had to call her husband for clarification. She wanted four quarts of milk a day and a pint of cream, her usual order. I never did learn to speak French, but in those days that didn’t prevent me from being hired, or bar me from progressing on the job. No matter what kind of English a person spoke, in time you could make yourself understood. Even my cockney friend “old man Ramsey” made out okay. (His name was given him because Ramsey was too old to be working, but he’d lied about his age. He had no pension.) In spite of the language difficulties, he never lost his sense of humour. He was used to people misunderstanding him because of his cockney accent. One day he told us a joke about going to school in England. His teacher had drawn a deer on the blackboard, but none of the cockney children could tell her the word to name the animal she had drawn. Eventually she gave her students a clue by asking, “What does your dad call your mother when he’s talking to her nice?” 26 CHASING THE COMET “Oh teacher,” said my friend, “You can’t fool us. That not a picture of a bleedin’ old cow...