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For Instance, we were very poor.  Father's earnings during my boyhood were fifteen dollars a week.  There were four of us boys, but we slept two to a bed, a large comfortable bed, in a bedroom.  We had a bathroom, at any rate after my earliest childhood.  (As a very small boy in Toronto, I remember having to go to an out-house at the far end of the yard, and I still remember how in winter my bottom would be nearly frozen.  I didn't dawdle then as I do today, with a book!   You had to work fast in those days.)  We lived in a small cottage in downtown Toronto near what later became Chinatown, and I don't recall feeling it was crowded although father's three brothers and my mother's sister lived with us.  Of course, they worked all day and it must have been crowded only in the evenings and on Sundays, but I have no such impression.  Naturally they paid for their bed and board, which helped stretch the fifteen dollars.  My poor mother did all the laundry, by hand, for all of us, made all the beds, did all the cooking and ironing and scrubbing, washed all the dishes, for six adults and four small children, with no labor-saving devices of any kind.

Life was lived in the kitchen, at any rate in the winter.   The wood-and-coal stove provided all the heat there was, and had to be kept going night and day or the tap (cold water only) would be frozen in the morning.  The only trace of unhappiness that penetrated my consciousness was my mother's sufferings from dreadfully chapped hands in the winter -- she was constantly hanging wet washing out on the line and apperently knew nothing of hand lotions or else couldn't afford them -- and from fearful bouts of jelousy of her young sister to whom she thought (rightly, I suspect) father was paying too much attention.  I can't say that at six or seven I really understood jealousy, but I was aware of the tension and I remember seeing father once sitting on my aunt's bed while she was still in it, and I remember my mother fainting after a long bout of rage, and father looking a bit sheepish about the whole business.

But while all this seems to me today to be dreadful poverty, it was almost luxury compared to my father's life as a boy in Balobos-chine.   It was a small hamlet of stark wooden cottages, with floors of beaten earth, each containing a huge built-in stove the size of a large almost floor-to-ceiling closet or wardrobe, built of brick, with a flat surface on top a few feet below the roof, where a few people could sleep in the winter time.  There were a couple of tiny windows, and a curtained-off corner with a bed in it for grandpa and grandma.  A deal table and a few rickety stools or benches, and a shelf for the few dishes and pots and the bible and prayer books.  A nail or two in the wall for the old overcoats completed the decor.   Not beds for the five children, who slept wherever they happened to be when they dozed off; on a stool with thier heads on the table, or on the floor near the stove, or on top of the stove for those who were quick enough to grab a place.

There were frequent fights among the children for places on the stove in the winters.  Anyone sick of course had priority.  They slept in their clothes they wore all day -- pyjamas and nightgowns were never heard of.  In the winter you even put on your overcoat and goloshes in case the fire went out during the night.  It reminds me of the years you spent wandering about Europe sleeping in youth hostels for thirty cents a night, and you wore your sweaters and overcoats and goloshes to bed.  In your case it was a youthful adventure, but for father and his brothers and sister it was the normal way of life.  They would have reacted to you exactly as the Italians did in those days when they asked you, with that chaming nosiness: how much do your parents send you a month? and you said "$120," "A HUNDRED AND TWENTY DOLLARS?!!  American dollars?" "Yes." "EVERY MONTH?!!" "Yes." "Mama mia! You're rich!"  And here we felt we were keeping you on a shoestring!  It's like the old vaudeville haiku, isn't it:

        It all depends on where you sit,
        When the man in the gallery's going to spit!

Do you recall the years, Gordon, when mum and I freelanced in Toronto after I left the quartet?  It was a risky life in a way:  one week I'd make $25, the next week $200, another week nothing -- and I remember discussing this with Kathleen Parlow, with whom I was studying at the time.  She couldn't understand how I could be relaxed and carefree under such conditions.  She said she'd rather have $50 a week every week, even if by the end of the year she would have made more by freelancing.  But we rather liked it, and when there was a windfall, we splurged.   Since father was, in a that sense, like Parlow, and would have been driven mad by the 'uncertainty principle', I've often wondered if I didn't inherit this trait from my grandfather.  For he was all of his life a freelance.  Of course I don't know if he enjoyed it.  He might have hated it but had no alternative.  Apparently he had no trade or profession but made his living most of the time being a steward on large estates.  I use the plural because he was always changing his job -- not voluntarily, I understand -- but always succeeded in finding another estate to manage.  He was apparently very honest and large landowners felt they could trust him, but it seems he was not efficient and would get things into an awful tangle.  So he had to find another estate.

This involved a great deal of travel and he would be away from home for long stretches.  However, when he was away from home it usually meant he was working, and that meant a frequent pay envelope in the mail.  When he suddenly appeared his family was glad to see him but it meant he was between jobs.  Poor Slava, she like her husband, but was in the awful dilemma that they only ate well when he was away.  He was a lovable man, good natured, friendly and obliging, and he aroused paternal and maternal feelings in all who met him.  This may be why he always managed to get another job.  And when he suddenly appeared at home Slava always knew that he'd been fired again, and would ask what happened.   But all he would say was: "Oh, drat that baron (or count), he's impossible!"

That was the worst he would ever say of anyone.  He never made a wounding remark in this life.  He was just not efficient.  And being inefficient, why he would choose to run large estates I'll never know.   Socrates' impossible command: Know thyself! has fallen on deaf ears so long that by now it's probably no more than a beautiful thought.  Like our acquaintances in Sarnia who had a little daughter who was just a darling -- she disobeyed her parents with the persistance of a genius.  One night at bedtime her mother gave her a long, sorrowful talk on how much unhappiness she caused her loving mama and papa, both of whom loved her dearly, and couldn't she try to restore their hearts with gladness by being a good girl?   She looked at her mother with just a soupcon on tears in her lovely eyes, and finally said: "Say it again mummy, it's so beautiful!"

I know only one instance that illustrates my grandfather's -- shall I say: unreliability?  In his travels, which were often by train, he, in true Russian style, never bought a ticket.  He would just bribe the conductor.   Now I said earlier he was very honest, and so he was.  But in Russia in those days, the 1870's, who would be such an ass as to buy a ticket for 10 roubles when you could get to your destination by giving the conductor one rouble?  Of course the conductor had to know you -- he couldn't risk it with a stranger -- but as grandpa travelled a great deal he knew all the conductors of the area.

Since this was a widespread practice, the railroad had a system of inspectors (who presumably were not bribeable) who got on and off trains at unexpected moments.  On these occasions the conductor would hide grandpa in a closet, or a mailbag, or whatever, until the inspector got off.  He would be locked in and would remain very quiet until the conductor judged it safe to let him out.  On one occasion, however, the inspector stayed on much longer than usual, and as he was checking all passengers' tickets with the conductor beside him, the poor man couldn't get to grandpa to warn him that the inspector was still on board.  Grandpa, on the other hand, decided that the conductor had forgotten him, and began to beat the door a la Khrushchev with his shoe and yelling at the top of his voice to be let out.  This behaviour let the cat out of the bag, and there was a great to-do.  I don't know how it was all settled, and whether the conductor lost his job -- probably not, as he would most likely have slipped the inspector ten roubles and that would have been the end of that.  However, after this grandpa got no more free rides!