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4 Toronto: Youth I had travelled little. I knew a good deal of my native Vancouver Island, but even there the furthest west I had been from Victoria was Sooke, and the furthest north Campbell River. Excursions off the island had taken me as far south as Portland in northern Oregon and as far east as Banff in Alberta. Now, as a young music student during the years 1945 through 1949, I crossed the continent in Canada or the US as far as Toronto, by train or bus, twice a year, spending the school season there and the summer in Victoria. My first trip, by Canadian Pacific, included stops in Kamloops to visit my mother’s sister Agnes Carmichael and her family and in Regina to visit my father’s cousin David Rogers and his family including at that time his mother, my formidable great-aunt Grace Dean McLeod Rogers, who took it as her duty to warn of the dangers lurking as I set out on my life’s path and to instruct me in behaviour and status : McLeod men, by her rules, didn’t help with the dishwashing but were expected to make their own beds. The only city larger than Victoria I had known was Vancouver; Toronto was bigger and different. Miss your bus in leisurely Victoria and you waited twenty minutes for the next one; in Toronto the tandem streetcars rumbled up Yonge Street at the rate of one every three minutes. The drivers called the stops in an Ontario twang, “Callege and Carten” for “College and Carlton,” or “Blooah!” for “Bloor” (like a drill sergeant’s shout, “March!”). The Star and the Tely (i.e., Evening Telegram) sold on the streets (“Star/Tely paper here!”) for three cents, The Globe and Mail for five. Size and pace took getting used to. People’s attitudes were different, too. I had, I suppose, unconsciously absorbed the nuanced coexistence of Canadians, ex-Brits, and Asians in Victoria and Vancouver society but 63 had observed no intolerance or prejudice against Jews. Victoria’s Jewish population was minimal; there was one synagogue, and the few Jewish families I knew had changed their names (Meyerstein to Marston, for example ) and observed no distinctive lifestyle. In Toronto it surprised and puzzled me to hear openly anti-Semitic comments from adults I regarded as intelligent and humane. Such talk bore no relevance to the friendships I formed with Jewish fellow students in music. Alexandra McGavin, formerly a piano student of Gwen Harper’s in Victoria , was now studying with Alberto Guerrero and living with a fellow student in a row house on Aylmer Avenue.1 They kindly gave me a room while I looked for somewhere inexpensive to stay. There was a women’s residence attached to the Conservatory building at College and University, but nothing comparable for men. After a few days’ search, I took a room at the College Street YMCA for five dollars a week; that was to be my home for three school years.2 From it, I could walk in ten minutes to the Conservatory and in five to Alberto Guerrero’s studio on Grosvenor. Directly across the street was the art deco grandeur of Eaton’s College Street, the department store’s classy uptown branch, with the Eaton Auditorium on the top floor. I took low-cost meals in either the “Y” cafeteria or Eaton’s basement café; alternatives were the cafeteria in the basement of the Conservatory , the Honey Dew restaurant nearby, or, a little further away, Mary John’s in the Gerrard Street artists’ quarter. The butter tarts at Mary John’s were a nickel each; coffee was usually ten cents, but you could get something approximating coffee at Kresge’s for five. Coached by my parents to be thrifty, I budgeted carefully and tried to spend no more than a dollar a day on food. At the Conservatory I was offered a choice of which teacher I wanted to study with. Otherwise, Principal Ettore Mazzoleni would assign me to someone. I said I wanted Guerrero. He had been my examiner, and I appreciated his assessment of my talent, respected him, felt grateful to him for having recommended me. Alex McGavin enthused about her lessons with him. Whether I had heard any of his solo performances on the radio I can’t recall, but I certainly knew of his high reputation. He accepted me in his class and became in the next few years a...

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