The Henderson Family: Clare and Family

Life in a One-Room Schoolhouse

I am sitting on the left beside Harold Kingston and Keith Somerville.

I started school when I was only 4 going on 5, because my brother Ray was the teacher and he took pity on me. I would stand alone at our house and watch the kids playing and having a great deal of fun in the school yard just across the highway. He finally took me by the hand and led me across the road, my start at formal learning.

The school room was set up with the little desks in a row on one side of the space with each row getting larger and larger until the big desks lined the other side of the room. At the front were two blackboards with risers in front of them. The teacher’s desk was there as well. In the very centre was a large wood-burning stove designed to keep the schoolhouse warm in winter. Sometimes it was so cold in January, that we all had to huddle around the stove to keep from freezing.

The school building was built of stone as you can see in the photograph. It had three large windows on each side and two windows at the door end. The other end had a door leading to the huge wood shed that was piled to the roof with split maple to burn in winter. It made a great place to hide during recess when we played hide and seek. Sometimes we would climb in among the piles of wood and block up the hole so we couldn’t be seen. Unfortunately, we always had to appear when the school bell rang to end recess.

The teacher must have been pretty busy with kids from grades one to eight. As each person grew larger they moved to a larger desk, and, presumably, a higher grade. I imagine the teacher grouped kids as much by ability as by age, which was great advantage for kids with ability. One of the great advantages of a one-room school house is that everybody gets to hear all of the lessons. I remember wondering why those big guys didn’t know the answers to the teacher’s questions when they seemed obvious to me. I mean, there’s the map on the wall. Java is right there –that pink island in the Pacific Ocean!

Those were the days of the grade 8 examinations, the entrance to high school. I recall that Keith Somerville and I were the top students in grade 8 and had no trouble passing the examinations, but not everyone passed them because not everyone continued on to high school.

I remember most of my school mates well. In the photo, that is me at the left in front beside Harold Kingston and Keith Somerville. Behind us are Barbara Douglas, Audrey Grue and Rita Kingston. I cannot identify the rest.

Life in the one-room school house had its advantages. You certainly got to know everyone.

Music

Before electricity, there was music. Apart from the radio, though, it had to be live.

We had a piano in the living room, a black upright with ivory keys purchased, no doubt, from the Eatons catalogue. I remember that Madeline played it by ear, which means that she could rattle off any piece that she had heard.

After she left home to work in Brockville, she brought home a boy friend who was a trained pianist, the first to enter our doorway I am sure. He played Rachmaninoff flawlessly, and I remember sitting enthralled since I had not heard anything in the way of classical music, except on the radio as the introduction to Maw Perkins or another of the afternoon soap operas.

My mother played the piano, but she focussed on hymns. I think she could read music enough to turn out a reasonable rendition of Rock of Ages. In case you don’t know it, this hymn was a favourite at the Presbyterian church service because it is slow and dolorous, suiting the dour gray-haired Scots that attended.

Ray was really musical. He was always picking at a guitar and singing cowboy ballads or squeezing the accordion and belting out the latest songs. He was self-taught, but a natural performer in those days before CDs and iPods.

We had a neighbour that could play the fife and step dance at the same time. Getting Ray and him together for a concert in the living room was really something.

And I used to sing, with the emphasis on "used to." I remember singing "You Are My Sunshine" as a duet with Barbara Douglas at about the age we are in the picture above. That school concert was my debut, and I am sure my sisters thought that it was very cute.

Pass Them All

Me and My Cars

I have always been interested in cars, and it is easy to see why. My pedal car was my prize possession when I was 5 and my red MGA was my prize when I was 25.

As I was growing up, we could not afford a modern car and had to do with castoffs. I remember my brother Ray arriving late at night in a 1931 Buick. He was in the air force at the time, likely posted to Trenton air base. He returned on the bus leaving the car behind.

We drove that for quite a while, and I say "we", because my father taught me to drive in that car. We would go up Buckwheat Row where there was very little traffic. It was a pretty rough gravel side road. After one such trip with me at the wheel, I remember him saying, "You must be a good driver. Only a good driver could hit all the pot holes."

I remember we graduated to a 1934 Plymouth with so-called suicide doors. Like the Buick, it would not start in the depths of winter and we had to pull it out to the road with the team of horses and drag it in second gear until it started.

After I graduated from University and had an income, I bought a shiny read MGA with chrome wire wheels from George at Cooke-Toledo Motors in Montreal. This was my pride and joy, polished every day. When I pulled into the yard at home, my mother turned up her nose and asked, "What kind of a car is that?" After one ride she was converted to sports cars. She really loved it.

In an MG, you never follow anyone; you pass them all.

Swimming

Growing up at a time in a place when and where there were no community swimming pools, no rivers, no lakes, no real ponds and poor transportation choices meant that learning to swim was virtually impossible.

My firends and I used to search for ponds that were more than knee deep and tried to splash around to get a decent dog paddle going. There was a gravel pit back the highway a few miles that we used to bicycle to, but it was only full of water in the spring when it was too cold to swim.

The Nation River flows through Spencerville, so there was a chance to get into deep water behind the dam, but only if you could already swim. The mighty St. Lawrence is only fifteen miles away, but it might as well have been fifteen hundred.

So now we own a cottage where we spend the summer months fifty feet from the water, a great place for me to cool off on those hot, muggy August days, while others wear out the water with energy and skill. I never found a pond this deep.

Clare and Judy: The Wedding

There are no wedding pictures, so this one will have to do.

We were married quietly in Ottawa in 1962, and we didn’t tell anyone for some time. Judy was working for Trade and Commerce and I was teaching in Madoc. Since she was living with her mother and sister Shelly in Ottawa, we decided to live separately for a while and meet up on weekends.

When we decided that enough was enough, the "coming out" proved interesting. I remember the first time we told anyone in Madoc was at a school dance. "Les", I said to the principal, "this is my wife." His jaw dropped. The look on his face was worth waiting for.

"Meeting up" was sometimes a problem. Judy had a car that she bought for $50 –in those days that was possible– that she used to come up to Madoc on Friday evening and back on Sunday. It was an Austin A40 Devon that had seen better days. It was unsuited to Canadian winters so that the windshield wipers would freeze up and she would have to stop and clear them of ice.

I recall using it in the summer to go camping from Ottawa up into the Gatineau Hills. This model had a trunk lid that opened down so you could pile a lot of stuff on it. We tied all the camping gear on and four or five of us piled into the car, which was now so back heavy that the front wheels almost lifted off the ground. I drove very carefully with the front of the car bouncing up and down.

When she moved to Madoc, Judy sold that car to one of my students for what she paid for it –an exemplary instance of recycling.

Madoc was an interesting experience for Judy. I was in my third year there when she joined me in the little apartment over Devolin’s Grocery store. When she walked down the street past Richard’s Restaurant with her long pony tail and a black turtle neck, the conversation inside was about "that beatnik Judy Henderson." I guess the pair of us seemed a little exotic in those early 60's.

In the summer of 1963, I left my job in Madoc and we moved to Ottawa where Judy returned to work and I returned to school. At Ottawa U, I studied for an MA in English, but I never actually finished it, lacking a thesis, although I knew just about everything there was to know about Harold Pinter and the Theatre of the Absurd by the time we left Ottawa for Norwood.

We stayed in Norwood for two years, but the yearning to travel out of rural Ontario became intense. I applied to teach for the armed forces in Germany and, at the same time, applied to CIDA to teach abroad. In 1966, with two little kids, Scott and Shelley, we flew off to Kenya.

And Kenya is another tale.

The Kids

Of course, they have changed over the years.
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The top photograph shows all three of them together at the cottage.

The middle photo shows Scott and Shelley in Kenya in 1968.

The bottom photo was taken at Paul and Shelley's combined birthday party in Toronto November, 2005.

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Paul

Paul came along much later. We had all been to Kenya for five years from 1966 to 1971 when, on our return, he appeared in Oakville on November 21.

With his distinctive red curly hair, he was a great hit in the supermarkets. The ladies couldn’t stop themselves from touching it.

Possibly in self defence, he always liked to wear hats. He had a great big basket full of hats, and any trip to the market sent him to pick out a hat.

Christenings

Scott was born on May 1, 1963 and we had him christened in Ottawa with John Bruhwiler as god father and Shelly as god mother holding the subject of the exercise. Shirley and Ray were there. Judy’s mother is on Judy’s right with Sallee Bruhwiler on her left.

Shelley was born on November 28, 1964 in Peterborough. The colour picture shows us at the house in Norwood after her christening. With Judy in the photo are Shelley’s god parents, Frank and Donna Grebenc.
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Scott's Family

Scott married Karen from Pilot Mound, Manitoba. He met her in Winnipeg where he was working as Electrician at the Manitoba Theatre Centre. Later he decided to become a Lighting Designer and carved oit a successful career in Winnipeg lighting drama, ballet and opera productions. Karen is a music teacher in one of the districts in Winnipeg.

They were married at the cottage on Kahshe Lake and have two sons, Sean and Alex.

Scott and Karen Wedding

Paul's Family
In 2007, Paul married Joanne Menard in Lancaster, Ontario, and moved to Chilliwack, B.C., where he works as a journalist for the Chilliwack Times and Joanne operates a practice as a Doctor of Naturopathy.