Chapter 12

A NEW LIFE

So began the settling in process. Our paths were smoothed by the incredibly kind and helpful people with whom we came in contact - the bank manager who was keen to lend us money not only for a large mortgage as we had very little money but also to buy the essential appliances, the neighbour who sold us our house, the neighbour on the other side who brought in food, chairs, a radio and all sorts of good advice on services, schools etc, the friendly people in shops who just couldn’t seem to do enough to help a migrant family. And the Canadian government which ruled that we could live in Canada for two years tax-free while we decided whether we liked it enough there to settle permanently. We paid tax right from the beginning though because we knew already that we would stay and it didn’t seem honest to pretend otherwise.

At the end of the month, we duly moved into our new house. We had no furniture except our camping gear so we slept on our air mattresses in our sleeping bags. Tom being just one year old would not stay on his mattress so our first purchase was a second hand cot for him. It was a very fancy one with a musical mobile in the end of it that played Brahms’ Lullaby and he loved it – and so did everyone else. The neighbours across the road had boys around Marcus and Nick’s age – both called Brad so they were Big Brad and Little Brad for the sake of convenience and next to the Francis family lived a family with two younger children, Ilsa and Maris Kosics, who became the fast friends of Madeline and Tom.

It was summer and the weather was glorious. We bought a year’s family membership at the local swimming pool for $60 and took the children there most days. Then there was the day when we arrived at the pool and as we got out of the car, I said `Where’s Tom?’ I had assumed he was in the back with the older children – they thought he was in the front with us! We drove home as fast as was safe and there was Tom standing inside the front wire screen door looking puzzled and wondering where all his family had gone – not upset but definitely pleased to see us!

We registered the children in school. Our local Catholic primary school, Maryview, Kindergarten to Grade 3, was about three blocks from our house so an easy walk for everyone. We found the organisation of town planning in Red Deer was amazing – when a new subdivision was required because of increasing population the Red Deer city council would buy a quarter section - a quarter of a square mile of land – from a local farmer. All roads, water, sewerage, phones and electrical services had to be installed and two primary schools – one Catholic, one public, had to be built as well as a shopping centre - before any land was sold. This was so that every child was within walking distance of a school. Up to Grade 3 children all had to go home for lunch – only country children who came in by bus were allowed to eat lunch at school. Every home owner had to sign a document at City Hall saying which school system the education share of their taxes was to go to. This meant that Catholic and state schools had exactly the same amount of money per capita – such a shock for us coming from Australia where the Catholic system was of necessity self-supporting, with no State aid for Catholic schools.

One hitch was that one day as Reg went to step off the back step, he missed his footing and tore the ligaments in his ankle which was put in plaster so he actually started work at Innisfail High School on crutches – not a good look for a physical education teacher. He was also teaching psychology, geography and sociology. The school turned out to be something of a Blackboard Jungle which was why they still had a teaching vacancy. Teachers who went to other schools in Alberta would put a notice on the board in their staff room saying `Never teach at Innisfail’. The kids were out of control, the teachers were disaffected and the principal was an alcoholic. Reg made the best of it and was good at handling difficult kids anyway – he became fond of them and they of him and after the first year all that changed as the principal resigned and the new principal was excellent and turned Innisfail into a model school. Reg loved it there and made many friends among the staff – several of whom were ex-pats like ourselves – one from Australia and one from New York lived in Red Deer so they formed a carpool – another from Australia, one from the UK and a Maori from New Zealand all lived in Innisfail and all became close friends and there were many friendly Albertan teachers there too.

Belinda started school in Grade 5 at St Thomas Aquinas which was next door to Maryview and Celene and Marcus started at Maryview in Grades 3 and 1 respectively. They all settled in well and made friends quickly. By the end of the first week of school they all came home with Canadian accents – partly to avoid being laughed at and partly because the local children could not readily understand them. Nick started afternoon kindergarten at Bethany Baptist church which was right behind our house – so for the first time in years I had only two children at home for part of the day. Most mornings we would walk down to the shops which were about four blocks away but we always had to be home by lunchtime when the school children would be home for lunch. I learned to make bread and we would mix it up and set it to prove right after I did the breakfast dishes, then it would be baked by lunchtime and Reg and the children would be home just in time to eat hot rolls and the very popular cinnamon scrolls for lunch.

One afternoon at the end of October the children came home from school and said `If we go out with pillowcases and knock on people’s doors, they’ll give us candy’. How could that be? But sure enough, our helpful neighbour Stella confirmed that. `It’s called Halloween’ she told us. She helped me to dress them up and off they went (photo at right), coming home a couple of hours later with bags of candy and apples. By now the weather was beginning to get cold and in fact over the years it became a pattern that on Halloween we would have our first big snowfall; sometimes we had snow before that which would melt but after Halloween it never did until about the end of February or the first half of March.

Even though the weather took a little getting used to, it was exciting because it was so different from anything we had ever experienced. One morning we woke up to find the bedrooms filled with a strange white light; snow had fallen during the night. Reg, Marcus and Nick ran outside in their pyjamas and rolled in the snow and started to have a snowball fight but soon beat a hasty retreat inside blowing on their frozen fingers. Each year at the beginning of winter, when the nights began to get cold, Reg and our neighbour next door, Roger Villeneuve, removed the fence between our vegetable gardens and made a skating rink there (above). They carefully levelled the ground and packed it down and then with the garden hoses spread a thin sheet of water right across the area – that froze overnight and the next night they did the same again and so on until it was thick enough to skate on, with a hockey goal at each end. Our children would come home after school, drop their bags, have a quick snack, put on skates and grab hockey sticks and a puck and would be out there for hours, coming in only for dinner, with the outside lights on after it got dark. Reg skated there for the first time in his life on his fortieth birthday which seemed a good way to mark that special day. I was never much good at skating and would push a kitchen chair round on the ice to prevent disastrous falls – I couldn’t afford to break a bone – too much to do!

We all learned to ski too (right); we bought skis for the four older children for our second Christmas – skis, boots and poles for the children cost $19.95 a set from the Simpson-Sears catalogue and $29.95 for me and Reg bought himself a second hand set for $10. There was a ski hill right in town with a free tow where the children often went in the evenings but on Saturdays and Sundays, we would all go to Innisfail where there was a ski hill with a `pony tow’ – powered by a tractor at the bottom and with leather loops to hang onto as you went up the hill. We bought an annual family membership there for $35 which included tow fees and free lessons for all of us every weekend plus use of the lodge where we could go for a hot chocolate when we needed to warm up.

That year we bought a toboggan for Madeline and Tom and they would play at the bottom of the hill while the rest of us skied but the next year they had hand-down skis as all moved up a size. Like the skating I was never as good as Reg and the children who all became proficient very quickly and loved it. Belinda and Celene were excellent skiers and I still remember seeing Marcus and Nick skiing down the hill at top speed backwards without poles. One Christmas we got together with a crowd of other Australian teachers who were all living in Edmonton. We stayed at the Cedar Chalet motel at Mount Norquay in the Rockies for a skiing holiday and it was great fun. I overheard one of the others saying one night `Everywhere you look on the hill there’s another bloody Carr kid!’ It certainly must have seemed like that.

We learned to cope with winter temperatures that quite often dropped to -30C and sometimes to –40C, blizzards and vehicles that would never start if you forgot to plug in the block heater at night. Our first winter broke 50-year records for cold. An average day would have a high of –5 and a low of –35. By 10am the temperature would usually rise to about –20 and then the children (the three pre-schoolers) and I would walk to the shops which were about four blocks from where we lived. The only days that I didn’t take them out were windy ones because it would be announced over the radio that `the wind chill factor is expected to be -60 degrees’, for example and the little ones just couldn’t move fast enough to keep warm. The children all walked to school every day and the schools were never closed for weather the whole 20 years we lived in Canada – occasionally though the country students would not be able to get to school because the buses could not run if the snow had not yet been cleared on the roads.

On the plus side though, an amazing thing was the amount of sun in the winter – although daylight hours were only about 8.30 - 4.30 it would usually be sunny the whole time. The air is so cold that all moisture is frozen and drops to the ground so you could stand outside on a cold day and watch a fine ice shower falling through the air – and the trees were all covered with hoar frost so that they looked as though they were made of crystal – just unbelievably beautiful. Our first winter in Red Deer Reg built an igloo in the front garden – unlike the Inuit igloos which are flat on top, his was pointy but still it was a good achievement and a rare sight there, we would see people pointing to it as they drove slowly past.

The eight of us lived well on one salary – many things were cheaper than they had been in Melbourne. We had a 3 bedroom house with a full basement in which Reg built two more bedrooms, a playroom, one wall of which Reg painted black so that there was a whole wall of blackboard where the older girls taught school to the younger children and another bathroom and the laundry. Our ducted central heating which was run by natural gas (which, for most of the winter, had to heat the air from something like –20 outside to +20 inside) cost less per month than briquettes had done for the fire at home in Melbourne which really only heated the living area. We bought the wonderful Alberta beef by the side, cut and wrapped, for 54 cents a lb and at Christmas and other holidays we always bought a 25-lb turkey which cost 39 cents a lb. One of those huge turkeys would only just fit in my oven and would provide a feast for all of us and numerous visitors – by that night it would all be gone and I would make a big pot of soup from the bones. Lamb was more expensive and not much eaten over there because people said `It’s greasy.’ When we bought it (because we had Australian visitors and thought they’d like a taste of home) it was not very good and we realized that it had been finished on grain unlike that in Australia and was indeed `greasy’. Although tender it tasted like mutton.

Fruit and vegetables and most staple foods were similar in price to those in Melbourne but of course Reg was being paid twice as much even though he had gone from being a lecturer at Melbourne Teachers’ College to an ordinary high school teacher in Canada. Other things were much more affordable too – for example the city recreation program was free and everyone got involved in baseball in the summer and ice hockey in the winter. There was no competing for places on a team as they just went on creating teams until everyone who wanted to play had a place. The children were able to enjoy an independent life that would never have been possible in Melbourne. They all had bikes and were allowed to go where they liked as long as they were home by dark. When we had been in Canada for a year or so Belinda volunteered to be our babysitter so I said I would pay her what I had been paying the girl next door. She was only 12 but she did a wonderful job and was completely reliable so Reg and I had more freedom too to go to the library in the evening or to an occasional movie or to visit friends. Much later I found that she had a clever strategy with those somewhat difficult boys – she would promise them 10 cents for the best behaviour and then she never had any trouble as they would do anything for money.

Canada was a wonderful country for our children to grow up in and we never regretted our decision to move there. We travelled every summer the length and breadth of Canada and the United States, staying always in campgrounds in our big blue tent. Those are holidays that we all still remember fondly. In fact, our longest trip took place just the year after we arrived in Canada, in 1969. Below is the lovely city of Red Deer from the air. The Red Deer River runs right through the middle of the city and in the winter it would freeze solid so that small planes could land on it.