Life on the farm

Life on the farm

What were my parents like? My mother, in my memory, was a sick woman. She suffered severely from asthma, heart sickness and finally died of pneumonia when I was 13 years old. My mother spent most of her time and energy with my three sisters. She was well-trained in cooking, sewing, crafts and homemaking skills and trained her daughters in the same way. My training was delegated to my older siblings. I remember calling Margaret, who was ten years my senior, “little mother”. My mother was a jolly person and laughed a lot whenever she was together with her sisters. I never remember my mother complaining about her lot in life, which was very hard indeed. She was a fearful person. She was afraid when her family was away at night, when my father was in the bush cutting wood, when we were working with stock, etc. After my mother died, I broke a colt and my father’s comment was “you wouldn’t have been allowed to do that if your mother had been alive”

Unfortunately, I never felt special to my mother. It was my Dad’s responsibility and therefore felt as if I was my Dad’s little boy. My father, having been raised in wealthy circumstances by his grandparents (his mother died when he was four years old) came to Canada full of self assurance. He had managed estates when he was eighteen years old. He had his own estate as a very young man, made significant contributions to a private religious school and so on. However, his self assurance played a dirty trick on him in Saskatchewan. He didn’t consult or seek advice because, after all, he had been successful at an early age and he “knew”.

My father was a kind and gentle man who just couldn’t function well at the lower end of unskilled manual labor.

As a boy on the farm, there were many things to learn and do. At a very early age, we handled horses. My cousin and I lived 2 1/2 miles apart and we started visiting each other on horseback before we started school. My father used to have me use the second team (usually four horses) and follow him with various farm operations. This process started when I was five years old. When I started school, which was four miles away, we went in a buggy in spring and fall and a sleigh in winter. Naturally, since I was a boy, looking after the horses was my responsibility.

When I was thirteen, my parents and siblings went on vacation to Manitoba and left me on the farm to look after the six or so milk cows, pigs, chickens and horses, as well as go to school and prepare my own meals. In later years, I asked my Dad if they ever had any concerns about me. He replied that he had none because I was a very capable and sensible boy so why should they?

The new immigrants had one or two years of good crops (1927-1928) and fair prices, but then the bottom dropped out of the market (and the Great Depression started). In the 1930’s, drought, grasshoppers and armyworms took care of the rest.  It did not help that my Dad’s wife died in 1937. When my mother died, my Dad was very sad and withdrawn. I felt abandoned and on my own totally discouraged. We left the farm penniless in 1939 when I was 15 years old.