Blue Moon by James King Read Free Book Online Page B

father was fifth business. He looked and acted like a man of absolutely no importance. Small, squat and rodent-like, he did not have a single good facial feature. His look was furtive, always studying situations carefully and guardedly. Usually draped in massively over-large trench coats, he looked like one of those seedy, sweaty dirty men who populate Graham Greene novels. There were only two extraordinary things about him. He had a sudden, quick and violent temper, and he was an extremely possessive person. If he owned something, no one could remove it from him.
    Father, who looked to passers-by on the street a small, inconsequential creature, had a fierce leonine strength which belied his size. He also had a magnificent tenor voice which he displayed at Christ Church Cathedral on Sundays; every other day of the week, the din of his puny, snarling speaking voice was heard at the seedy Balmoral Tavern, near the Hamilton Street Railway headquarters where he worked. When drunk, I later heard, Father would, when teased about his height, invite his tormentor to retire to the washroom where he could view his equipment, the proportions of which were suitable for a titan.
    I was born in Beamsville on the Niagara Peninsula on 13 October 1920. My parents moved less than a year later to a modest two-bedroom house, which they had constructed, at 214 Rosslyn Avenue South in Hamilton. The house looked like a bungalow, but it had a large bedroom occupying the front of the house’s modest second storey. Our end of the street faced into the side of the escarpment; if we looked up we could see one of the roads carrying cars up the side of the Mountain where many residents of the city lived. The property values on our street were low because three doors away from us—on Lawrence Avenue—was a brick factory and a railway line. The side of the Mountain had been savagely ripped away to make room for them. Four huge kilns belched smoke into the air night and day; the fog horn sounds of the trains blared mainly in the middle of the night.My parents, in an attempt to pretend that they did not live in Canada, filled their new home with things from the old country. “Bonnie Scotland” would have been a good name for the house, every room of which contained splendid views of lochs, highland mountains, and men in kilts.
    Hamilton was Canada’s Steel City, very much in the mould of Pittsburgh in the States or Leeds in England. Although graced with an enchantingly beautiful harbour on Lake Ontario, columns of black smoke poured regularly out of a vast multitude of smoke stacks. The stink that often penetrated the air reminded Mother of the foul odours that had filled her nostrils when she had visited Leeds.
    Like many other middle-sized cities in North America, Hamilton was largely blue-collar. The only difference between it and nearby Buffalo was the obvious English influence: the flags, the companies whose names ended in Limited and the fact that a significant portion of the adult population revealed British accents or Scottish burrs when they spoke. That group—placed in an uneasy middle between the rich and the poor were the middle-management types: the foremen and the bank managers.
    Never able to compete culturally with Toronto, nearly sixty miles away, Hamilton had in fact been sucked dry by the presence of the Metropolis at its doorstep. So it developed its own society based on a rigid segregation between rich and poor. The rich were the captains of industry and their attendant vassals; then there were the proles—Italian and Polish immigrants—who came to tend the smelters,
    Toronto was considered to be a very fast place and so things were appropriately slowed down in Hamilton. In reality, this meant that Hamilton was even more strait-laced than puritanical Toronto, still unaffectionately called Hog Town in the twenties and thirties. The jealousy that Hamilton felt for Toronto surfaced early, in 1847, when
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