I was six-and-a-half-years old when my family moved all of five miles from Burgessville, my first home, to the booming metropolis of Norwich in 1956.
And though I remember Burgessville fondly (Who wouldn’t? I stole my first quarter from the milk money envelope and
comic book from the corner store and almost drove a tractor into the creek) I still consider Norwich my hometown.
[Burgessville P.S.; a two-room schoolhouse when I attended Grade 1. Now a museum. Photo - 2007]
We moved into our new house as quickly as a swarm of wild bees and it seemed interesting enough from my limited and immature point of view.
It was made of wood and had several windows and big rooms and Mother was happy about the kitchen for about two minutes before she started tearing out a long, old-fashioned wall cupboard with a pull-out bin for flour or potatoes or whatever mothers would stick in there (that cupboard would be worth a pile of potatoes today), and Dad liked to crawl under the house with his pal Gord Bucholtz and drink beer and eat peanuts while talking about plumbing or electricity or whatever fathers do when wiggling around in what I thought was just a dark hole in the ground.
If not for the lure of salted peanuts I’m sure I wouldn’t have climbed down under the floor with them.
The new village seemed interesting too once I figured out where the school and playground were located (directly across the street from our small front porch and one block away from our back door respectively) and learned the names of a few kids in the neighbourhood.
Gary, Tom, David and Ken were my favourite pals. I still have some contact with two of them but we’re much older now and don’t go outside to play together very often.
There was a great advantage in living 12 giant steps from the schoolyard.
After a quick bowl of porridge in the morning I could rush out to the porch, slam the screen door, jump off the front steps and start playing soccer or baseball in less than 5 seconds - or shoot a few of my thousands of marbles out of a slingshot over Mr. Minor’s fence at 1,000 miles per hour.
And because afternoon classes didn’t start until 1:30 the kids who ran home, ate lunch in under ten minutes (which was easy - if our mothers got distracted by other kids at the table or The Three Stooges weren’t on TV - nyuk nyuk) would often get back to school and play scrub for over an hour.
I’m not kidding. Each young boy would get a chance to play every position in baseball at least twice before the bell rang for first class, even if we had five or more fielders.
Many kids lived for baseball in the summer and snowballs in the winter and though we had the longest lunch breaks in the history of early childhood we still groaned when the bell rang and it wasn’t unusual for teachers to yell at a hectic group of children several times before any pretended to hear them for the first time.
Miss Walker, my Grade 1 teacher, was probably a wonderful instructor and deserved as much respect as the next person but I wasn’t old enough to quickly figure out how closely she wanted me to listen to her every word and my lack of attention didn’t impress her much at first.
While other students were busy watching her point at important material on the blackboard I liked to stare at the black alphabet cards, press my fingers against the sides of my eyeballs and wait for bright, techno-colored circles to float around inside of my head like a psychedelic display.
[
"Like a psychedelic display and it wasn't even the sixties!"]
One day she noticed I wasn’t paying any attention to her well-prepared language drills and snuck up on me before my vision had cleared enough for me to see her standing beside my desk with a ruler raised over her shoulder.
Ouch! That hurt!
“Recite the alphabet, Gordon Harrison.”
“Okay. Where is it again?”
Though embarrassed at the time I got even.
I didn’t send her a card on Valentine’s Day.
***
Norwich Fun Fact: The population from 1955 - 2008 has remained unusually steady. As long as I can remember the number of births and deaths in my hometown have been the same each year and the sign outside town has read 1,600.
Know any others?
