A Pitt Meadows Farm Story by Larry Gray <\/strong><\/div>\r\n
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When I was a small boy, Pitt Meadows had many dairy farms but only a few people living there…My mother, Margot Marion Pollock, was the third of six children. She was born in Maple Ridge in March of 1924 and went to school there until she had to leave in grade 10 to stay home to take care of her sister and her two young brothers because her mother had to return to work… Margot loved to read and she enjoyed playing with her brothers and younger sister on the family chicken farm. Margot said that she always liked playing with boys’ toys rather than girls’. She did not have a bike but would sometimes borrow her brother’s and would ride to swim in the Alouette River, five kilometres away. When she was 11 years old, she was given some seeds by her teacher and grew a vegetable garden. In the fall fair, she won a number of prizes for her vegetables and an overall prize for her garden. Margot was a slim, attractive young woman who was chosen as Miss Canada by the Maple Ridge Legion when she was a teenager. She rode in a car in the May Day parade and had to give a speech. She said she was nervous but proud that she was able to do this.<\/div>\r\n
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My father, Carswell Lothian Gray, was born in November of 1915 in New Westminster into a family of 9 children. He had a twin brother named Alfred Thomas. My grandmother named my father after Dr. Carswell who delivered him and then gave my dad her surname, Lothian. This always seemed unfair to my father who ended up with such an unusual name when his brother got a normal-sounding name. When the twins came home from the hospital, they looked alike except my father had light-coloured hair and his brother had dark hair so they were nicknamed ‘Fairy’ and ‘Darky’. For the rest of their lives, the twins were only known by these nicknames…so there you have it. The fairy in this story was my father, who hated to be called Carswell, always preferring to be known as Fairy Gray.<\/div>\r\n
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As a young boy, Fairy was a good student, especially in arithmetic, and he was a fast runner. His nickname was ‘Greyhound’ because of his skill at running and, of course, because of his surname. He was an amateur boxer as a teenager and once fought against his twin brother in a match which was declared a tie by the judges. When he was 13, Fairy’s mother took Fairy out of school, even though he showed promise as a clever pupil. Fairy’s older sister, Etta, and her husband, Alred, offered to take him in so he could continue his education. Fairy’s mother insisted, however, that he quit school so that he could go to work in order to bring in money for the family which was facing very hard times because Fairy’s father had been killed at Vimy Ridge. Fairy went to work for Alred, helping to pick up milk from the dairy farms in Chilliwack.<\/div>\r\n
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So both of my parents were forced to leave school at an early age and each worked a variety of jobs as teenagers. Fairy was a plumber for a while but left that profession because he did not like climbing under old houses to connect pipes. Margot worked in canning factories, making jam. Margot and Fairy met one day while Margot was babysitting Darky’s children. At the time, Fairy had just lost his first wife, Hazel, who had died in 1945 after a long illness. Hazel Cook was a granddaughter of English farming settlers, Edward and Annie Cook, who came to Pitt Meadows in the late 1800’s. Margot was recently divorced from her first husband who did not return home after serving in World War Two. They started dating and in 1946 they were married. Margot was 22 years old and Fairy was 30. So they were both starting over with their lives and were probably very excited about the prospects for their future.<\/div>\r\n
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Fairy owned a small farm in Pitt Meadows. When he first bought it, the farm was about 50 acres but Fairy had sold half of it to pay for his former wife’s medical bills. Mr. Tulley, who sold the farm to Fairy, had been in the hospital for a few years and also had to give up his farm to pay medical bills. In those days there was no government medical insurance like there is now and people had to pay doctors for any treatment if they got sick. The farm had been abandoned for some time when Fairy bought it so everything had to be repaired. There was an old run-down house, a barn and a few sheds. Margot said that cows that had been roaming inside the house so it must have been pretty messed up. The house and barn had no electricity, no water that could be used for drinking, no telephone and there were no farm animals.<\/div>\r\n
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Originally, the house had been a church hall owned by a group called the Seventh Day Adventists who built it around 1900 and then abandoned it around 1914. Mr. Tulley dragged the building by horses about 1.5 km down the road to his farm. The road to the farm was named Advent Road after the church congregation. The farm was at the end of a dead-end road so Mr. Tulley called the last stretch of road into his farm Tulley Road. When I was a young child, we could use either Tulley Road or Advent Road as our address and the people at the post office would make sure the mail made it to us. Now it is just Advent Road but Mr. Tulley’s name has not been forgotten as there is a slough nearby the farm which has been named after him. It was time for Fairy and Margot to begin putting the farm back into working order.<\/div>\r\n
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If this was your farm, what would you think needed to be done first? Get drinking water, buy some milk cows, hook up electricity, get a phone, buy farming equipment, fix up the house and barn? All of these things would cost quite a lot and Fairy and Margot did not have any extra money so they would have to work at other jobs and find ways for their farm to make money for them. Fairy worked as a shingle sawyer in Hammond Cedar Mill making shingles and shakes for roofing. Margot worked in a local peat plant cutting bales of peat to be used for burning in stoves or for gardening. These two jobs provided enough money for them to start saving to rebuild their farm.<\/div>\r\n
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Milk Cows <\/strong><\/div>\r\n
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First on Margot and Fairy’s list was to make the house habitable with some minor repairs, so that was something they did immediately, but if you guessed that getting milk cows was one of the most important things on their ‘to-do ‘ list then you were right. Margot and Fairy decided that the number one priority was to buy some milk cows to start their dairy farm. Their first cow was called Blossom and my mother always spoke fondly of her. She said that Blossom was a very pretty cow with big brown eyes. Soon other cows were purchased and a small milk herd of about 12 cows produced milk which could be sold to make money. Fairy and Margot worked very hard at their day jobs but also had to spend about an hour milking the cows very early in the morning and again at night. On weekends they made some repairs on the house and barn and rebuilt fences around the property. With a small herd of cows, the farm began to produce some money through milk sales. The expensive things like electricity and water would have to wait until they could afford them. Fairy and Margot must have been exhausted at the end of the day, but they also must have felt very happy with the progress they were making. Soon after Margot and Fairy were married, Margot’s 14-year-old brother, Ken, came to live with them on the farm. Uncle Ken is now 89 years old and lives in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. He remembers asking if he could help milk the cows when he first arrived but was not allowed to do so until he was about 15. After school and on weekends he still could assist with many farm chores, however, and was a big help to Margot and Fairy.<\/div>\r\n
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Born in a Flood<\/strong><\/div>\r\n
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As well as fixing up the farm, Fairy and Margot wanted to start a family and two years after they were married I was born. The timing of my birth was a problem because it happened during a very famous and terrible Fraser River flood. When they knew it was time for me to come into the world, they drove to the hospital in New Westminster which was about an hour away. Their car had to splash through water which was across some roads so it must have been quite frightening for both parents. Fairy left Margot in the hospital, and, because of the rising waters of the flood, he drove back home to let the cows out of the fields so they could go onto the higher ground of the railroad tracks which were on the northern border of the farm. Hopefully, they would not be caught in the flood. Luckily, the water did not rise to a dangerous level on our farm so the cows were safe. We have not had another flood as bad since that time, over 70 years ago.<\/div>\r\n
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So I entered the world at an exciting time. And a very, very different place than the world today. Can you guess at some of the changes? The rest of the story will introduce you to some of the important differences between then and now.<\/div>\r\n
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The Magic of Electricity<\/strong><\/div>\r\n
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If you guessed that one of the first things needed on the farm after getting cows would be electricity, then you were right but to get electrical service brought to the farm, Margot and Fairy would need to save money from the milk they sold to pay for the electrical poles to be erected. It took about five years, by the time I was three years old before they could afford electrical service. Ken remembers Fairy asking him to look down the line of power poles to make sure they were straight as they were being installed. Just think how wonderful that must have been for Margot and Fairy. Up to this point, they had to use lanterns or candles to see anything in the house or the barn after dark. Once Margot moved their bed without telling Fairy. As it was dark in the house on winter nights, Fairy went into the bedroom and jumped into bed where he expected it to be. He had a rude shock as he landed on the floor. He probably used some bad language!<\/div>\r\n
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Before getting electricity, Margot used to warm my baby bottles on a gas lantern and she would sometimes read by the lantern in the winter evenings. With no electricity, there were no washing machines and Margot would have used a scrub board to wash clothes and my diapers. Margot and Fairy’s lives were transformed with electricity. Reading by electric lights at night. Listening to the radio. Having hot water come out of the tap without having to heat it on the stove (which burned sawdust for heat). Being able to buy a clothes washing machine so that clothes would not have to be washed by hand. Being able to buy a fridge to keep food from spoiling. (Without electricity, people had ice boxes to store food and had to buy blocks of ice just like we do when camping today.) We take all these things for granted now, but life would have changed so much for Fairy and Margot with the connection to electricity.<\/div>\r\n
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The Gift of Water<\/strong><\/div>\r\n
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The next priority for Fairy and Margot was for safe drinking water. One of the biggest differences today was that the farm had no ‘city’ drinking water like we now have in our homes, where we just turn on a tap and out comes the water that we can pour into a glass. There was a slow-running steam called a slough that ran alongside the house but the water was not fit to drink. This slough has now been named Cook Slough after Hazel’s pioneering grandparents. Slough water could be used for doing some cleaning and for giving water to animals but drinking water for people was brought in large milk cans from another farm that had city water. This drinking water was kept in a storage can on the porch leading into the house. If you wanted a drink, you used a small pot with a handle, called a dipper that you dipped into the can and then poured the water into a cup. Water from the slough was pumped into the house but at first, there was no proper bathroom with a toilet and bathtub.<\/div>\r\n
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To bathe, Margot and Fairy used a large tin tub and heated water on their sawdust-burning kitchen stove. One afternoon Margot was taking a bath in the kitchen when she thought she heard the wind rattling the front door. She called out, ‘Just come in,’ as a joke and much to her embarrassed surprise, Alan Howe, from a neighbouring farm walked in. After that, Margot insisted that a proper bathroom be built even though they did not yet have city water to drink. To get water to the farm, Margot and Fairy had to pay for pipes to bring the water and, just like for electricity, they did not yet have enough money so they had to save for a few years. I was about four years old when city water arrived and we could finally retire the dipper and drink water right from the tap. This was a wonderful improvement for me and my parents. Without running tap water, some people had no toilets, so these people had outhouses similar to the ones you now find only in camping parks. Although by the time I was born, most people did have indoor toilets, not every farm had functioning bathrooms. The farm next to ours still used an outhouse until I was about 10 years old. Since their outhouse was outside their home, they used a ‘chamber pot’ if they had to ‘go’ in the middle of the night. This meant a rather smelly chamber pot needed to be emptied into the outhouse every morning. Yuck.<\/div>\r\n
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Fairy used to tell stories about when boys would play tricks on girls who would be using the outhouse at their elementary school. Since the outhouse was away from the main building, they would sneak around to the back of the outhouse, when girls were inside, and then make scary sounds or even push up against the outside to frighten the girls. The girls would tell their teacher and the boys would get in trouble and have to do extra chores like chopping wood for their classroom stove or cleaning the front steps of the school.<\/div>\r\n
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Milking Machines Could Help <\/strong><\/div>\r\n
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In the early days of their farm, Margot, Fairy and Ken had to milk the cows by hand. This is done by sitting on a stool, holding a milk pail between your legs, and using your hands to squeeze teats on the cow's udder. Each cow’s udder has four teats. To get milk, you pull with one hand on one teat and then pull with your other hand on the second teat, up and down, up and down until one-half of the udder is empty, before starting the third and fourth teats. Prior to milking the cow, the udder has to be washed carefully to make sure the milk is kept clean during the milking process. All this takes time, probably an hour for two people to milk 12 cows. Cows need to be milked twice a day so Margot and Fairy had to get up at 5:30 in the morning to do the first milking and then do another milking in the evening after dinner. When the morning milking was finished, Margot would go to the house to cook breakfast while Fairy washed up all the milking equipment. Following breakfast, Fairy would go to work in the sawmill and before I was born Margot would go to work cutting and stacking peat.<\/div>\r\n
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After her work at the peat plant, Margot would come home to cook supper and when Fairy arrived back from the sawmill, they would eat dinner and then both would go to the barn to milk the cows. Fairy would clean out the cow manure in the barn every day and he would feed the cows in the winter when they stayed inside the barn. Margot would also have to do other chores like cleaning the house, cooking meals, cleaning dishes and washing clothes by hand as there was no electricity for a clotheswasher. It was a hard life and they were surely very tired by the end of every day. And cows must be milked 7 days a week! They do not take time off on the weekends. In the springs, summer and fall the cows graze in the fields called pastures but they come into the barn to be milked. Fairy would call out ‘Kooboss, Kooboss’ several times and the cows would parade in a line toward the barn, being led by the ‘mother cow’ who was the boss of the herd. When they got to the barn, they would go to a stall where they would be fed some grain and locked into a stanchion, a set of bars that went around their necks so that they would stand still when they were being fed or milked.<\/div>\r\n
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After Ken started milking cows, Margot was able to stop milking the cows so she could look after me as I was still a tiny baby but she had many other farm chores, besides being a busy mother, for example: feeding the chickens, gathering eggs, looking after the housework, cooking meals and tending a large vegetable garden. When I was a little boy, I hated that we had to always be home by 4:00 in the afternoon to have our dinner and then milk the cows.<\/div>\r\n
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Sometimes on weekends we would go to a beach or go on picnics with other families but we always had to leave before others so we could get home to do the milking chores. During the early years, we were unable to go away for many vacations because someone would need to milk the cows. By the time I was about 9 years old, however, we finally started going on regular one or two-week summer camping trips when an aunt and uncle would look after the farm, but short weekend trips were never possible. Our family was always tied to the demands of the dairy farm. I vowed never to become a dairy farmer when I grew up. After getting electricity, Fairy and Margot started saving money to buy two milking machines so they would not have to spend so much time milking the cows by hand. These machines had suction cups that fit over the cow's four teats and pulled the milk from their udders. While the milking machines were faster at milking the cows, each animal had to have the last bit of milk stripped from the udders and this needed to be done by hand so it still took two people to do the milking. Over the next 10 years, the milk herd grew from just one Blossom to about 20 milk cows. This meant more money coming in for other much-needed farm equipment.<\/div>\r\n
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Each morning the full milk cans would be placed outside on a platform where a milk truck driven by Doug McMyn, a member of another Pitt Meadows pioneer family, would come to haul them off to the plant where the milk would be pasteurized. This pasteurization involves heating the milk up to a high temperature to kill any germs or bacteria so the milk is safe to be sold in stores. Fairy and Margot belonged to a company that paid them for their milk. This company then sold the pasteurized milk to the stores. And that is pretty much the same process that is in place today, although the milk farms are much, much bigger now and small operations like our farm no longer exist. To make farms profitable, milk herds are often in the hundreds or even thousands of cows.<\/div>\r\n
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A Baby Brother <\/strong><\/div>\r\n
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When I was nearly four years old, my mother gave birth to another baby boy, they named Nelson. Since this was just about the time to get running water and electricity, life was rapidly changing for Fairy and Margot. Nelson was a happy, healthy baby who loved drinking milk. This was a good thing on a dairy farm where there was lots of milk. Unlike Nelson, when I was a baby, I had difficulty drinking cow milk and as I grew up I never liked the taste of milk, much to the dismay of my parents As a young child, Nelson showed a talent for music and was able to make people laugh with funny stories. It is not surprising that even now, Nelson is good at writing and telling stories and entertaining people with his guitar and singing.<\/div>\r\n
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Before many years had passed, Ken had grown up and left the farm so Margot again would go to the barn morning and night to help milk the cows and I would stay in the house to look after Nelson. Sometimes one of Darky’s sons, Teddy, would come to live with us on weekends. He was 8 years older than I was and, when he was 15, he came to live full-time on our farm. He then helped out with the milking and all the other farm chores. He was a big help to Margot and Fairy and was like a much older brother to Nelson and me.<\/div>\r\n
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Telephones and Party Lines <\/strong><\/div>\r\n
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In the early years of the farm, we had no telephone so if you needed to talk to someone by phone, you needed to walk or drive to a neighbour to ask to borrow their phone. After getting electricity, we then had the poles to string the phone wires into our house. Phones then were very different from those of today. There were no cell phones, and families only had one telephone which was often attached to a wall inside the house. Most people did not have a private phone line. Several families would be connected together on a ‘party line’. When the phone rang, everyone on the party line would hear the ring, but each house had its own ring. For example, two short rings might mean the call was for your house, while a short and long ring might mean it was for someone down the road. If you wanted to phone out, you would pick up the receiver and listen to see if anyone was talking. The polite thing to do if someone was ‘on the line’ was to hang up and try later. If it was an emergency, you could just ask the people on the line to hang up so that you could make your call. This party line enabled some people to quietly and secretly listen in on others' conversations without the people on the phone call knowing. We had one old woman on our party line who would very quietly pick up her phone even though the ring was for us. She did this so softly that we could not hear that she was ‘listening in’. After the call, she would often gossip to others about what we had been saying. This infuriated my mother and father, who often told her to stop, but she continued anyway. It was a big relief when we got a private line when I was about 12 years old.<\/div>\r\n
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Radio and TV <\/strong><\/div>\r\n
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Electricity also meant that we could listen to the radio. This was before television was invented for ordinary homes. We would sit around the radio and listen to music or programs for adults, like the news, or for kids, like storytime. When I was about 8 years old, we bought our first television. It had a small screen in black and white and there were only two channels, nothing like the wonderful TVs we have today with hundreds of channels, remote controls and high-definition colour pictures. Those first old black and white televisions seemed magical though at that time, and we were one of the first people in our area to get one. On Saturday nights for the first while, it was such a novelty that Margot and Fairy invited people from Advent Road to come and watch. Sometimes 10 or 12 people would visit and we would set viewing chairs out in our living room like a movie theatre. Getting a TV was a really big step for my parents. Up to this point, when they had no electricity or running tap water, they would have been considered quite poor, but the tv meant that all their hard work was starting to pay off. I remember feeling really proud that we were able to afford a television before a lot of other folks.<\/div>\r\n
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Work Horses <\/strong><\/div>\r\n
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We had more than just cows on our farm. At first, Fairy and Margot could not afford a tractor, so just like electricity and water, they had to save up money. It was cheaper but a lot slower to have horses to do the farm work like plowing the fields or cutting and storing hay for the winter. In the early years, up until the time I was about 5 years old, we had two large workhorses, one named Dobbin and the other called Blackie. These horses were a breed called Clydesdales, known for being smart and strong but very gentle. Dobbin was very well-behaved, while Blackie was sometimes a problem, and I always thought maybe that was how he got his name, however, it was more likely because he was a black horse.<\/div>\r\n
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Dobbin was a chestnut colour with a white blaze on the front of his head. These horses were very powerful and did all sorts of work on the farm. Blackie would behave himself better when he was hitched up with Dobbin who set a good example. During the spring, summer and early autumn, cows eat grass in the pastures but in the winter, they were brought into the barn to spend all day and night in their stanchion. This means that in the summer, farmers must cut and dry the tall grass in hay fields and then store this dried hay for feeding the animals in the winter. When Fairy and Margot first put up hay for the winter, it was not baled but was ‘loose’. The hay would be cut and stacked in fields and then a team of horses would be driven around the fields where men with pitchforks would ‘pitch’ the hay onto wagons. When the hay was brought to the barn it would be lifted off the wagon by a very large pitchfork that was stuck into the hay and then pulled up to the hayloft by a pulley. A rope was tied to Dobbin's harness and he pulled this heavy load until the hay was in position to be dropped into the hayloft. It would take several lifts like this to unload the whole wagon. At the age of 4, Fairy gave me the job of walking alongside Dobbin and holding a rope attached to his bridle. My father would call out ‘Whoa’ when he wanted Dobbin to stop and I would tug on the rope. Dobbin would always stop and I felt that I was doing an important job. Later when I was older I realized that Dobbin was a smart, well-trained horse and he would always stop when Fairy called ‘Whoa’. He really did not need me, but it was nice for my father to let me think I was helping out.<\/div>\r\n
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One day when I was four years old, my father and I were at a neighbour’s place with the two horses. It was about one kilometre from our house. He hoisted me up onto Dobbin and told the horse to go home with me sitting on this horse so large I could only fit my legs around its neck. Fairy felt this was quite safe because Dobbin was so well-behaved and smart enough to return to our farmyard. Fairy followed along riding Blackie, but he was a few minutes behind so I arrived at our barnyard all alone. Margot saw me and immediately got me down from Dobbin. She was very angry with Fairy for sending a little boy home on his own on such a large animal. Margot made sure that I never got to ride home alone again. The next year, Fairy and Margot bought their first tractor and sold the horses. Tractors could do more work faster than horses and you did not have to feed and groom them but I missed the big workhorses who had such a nice warm ‘horsey’ smell and who always liked it when you gave them an apple or handful or hay.<\/div>\r\n
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Other farm animals <\/strong><\/div>\r\n
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Besides the cows and horses, we had other animals on our farm. Sometimes we had pigs and we always had chickens. Margot looked after the chickens and we had more eggs than we could eat so Margot would sell these eggs to make some more money. One of my first farm chores was helping to feed the chickens and collect eggs. We also had some white ducks that swam in the slough that ran alongside our farm. I remember having turkeys one year but many of them got sick and died so we did not try to raise turkeys again. To feed the dairy cows, there was the hay and grain that was kept in the barn. This cow feed attracted mice and rats, so to keep the population of rodents under control we had ‘barn cats’. They were not pets that were allowed in the house and they were quite wild, not letting anyone near to pet them. When he milked the cows, Fairy would give these cats a bowl of warm milk, but other than that, the cats would have to hunt mice for their food. Sometimes, when Fairy was milking cows, a barn cat would walk up behind the cow and Fairy would squirt a stream of milk at the cat who quickly learned to open its mouth to catch the milk. This was a waste of good milk but it was a bit of fun for Fairy and the cat. <\/div>\r\n
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Farm Pets <\/strong><\/div>\r\n
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We had pets, too. Sometimes we had one or two pet cats who lived in the house and were fed milk and cat food. These cats, of course, were tame and loved to be petted. When I was very little, we had a dog named Jiggs. He was trained to hunt ducks and pheasants. When Fairy shot a duck of pheasant, Jiggs would run to fetch it for him. That would be a cheap dinner. A problem though was that Jiggs thought chickens were like birds he would hunt and sometimes he would chase the chickens when Margot was feeding them. One day, Jiggs got into the chicken pen when Margot was not there and killed several chickens. Fairy thought they would have to get rid of the dog but Ken suggested tying a dead chicken around Jigg’s neck to teach him a lesson. This idea worked. Jiggs got the message and never chased or killed any chickens again.<\/div>\r\n
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Dogs, like people, do not live forever and after Jiggs died from old age, we tried out a few dogs before we found one that was a good pet and a good farm dog. His name was Prince and he was a small terrier. He would run extremely fast for a small dog and he was very smart. We taught Prince many tricks but one thing he just knew how to do because of his breed was chasing and killing rats (and mice, too). Rats are so much bigger than mice that the barn cats tended not to catch them, but Prince was fearless in his pursuit of the rats which were a real problem, eating our cows grain and the chicken feed. It took him about three years but Prince managed to get rid of all the rats on the farm. Very good dog! Prince was my special friend. He went everywhere with me and on the farm and was a great companion. Sometimes there is a strong bond between a boy and his dog and there most certainly was one between Prince and myself.<\/div>\r\n
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We sometimes had rabbits for pets, too. We kept rabbits in cages and only let them out onto grass once in a while. We were always afraid that they might run away and one actually did, but he did not go far. He just dug burrows and tunnels under the chicken house to make a home for himself. He was too fast for us to catch but he was a pet nonetheless, a large white rabbit with pink eyes. We called him “Hoppenstopper” because when we would chase him he would ‘hop’ out of our reach and then ‘stop’ to look back at us. Hoppenstopper became a favourite because he learned to help out when feeding the chickens in the evening when the chickens had to be chased back into their hen house. Hoppenstopper loved to eat the wheat that we fed the chickens and he learned that he would get a handful of wheat after the chickens were all inside. Soon he was helping to herd chickens into their house so he could get his treat. He was a really smart rabbit. In the spring when young calves were out in the field, Hoppenstopper would sometimes play with them. He would go up to them and paw at their noses and then run away to make them chase him. He was quite the rabbit. I really enjoyed having him as a pet even as one we could not actually ‘pet’.<\/div>\r\n
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Nelson had his own special pet budgies (small parrot-like birds) which lived in birdcages our farmhouse. Sometimes Nelson would let them out of their cages to let them sit on his finger. Usually, they would then take off to fly around the house much to Margot’s displeasure and we would have to chase them around to catch them and put them back in their cages. Sometimes they would escape the house and fly off never to be seen again.<\/div>\r\n
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Friends<\/strong><\/div>\r\n
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Our farm was at the end of a road and our neighbours were about one kilometre away, so it was not like living on a street where there were lots of children to play with. Across the fields there was another farm, however, and there was a boy, John White, the same age as me. When I was a small boy, my parents and his were the best of friends so we used to play together all the time. One of our earliest favourite games was jumping in the haymow into the loose hay. Our old barn had a kind of platform like a wide shelf above the hay and running along one side of the haymow. It was very old and had some dangerous broken flooring but if we climbed up on this unsafe platform, we could jump down about 3 or 4 meters into the soft hay, causing a plume of dust to fly up and sometimes burying us in the hay. We were warned not to do this as the platform was dangerous, but we were allowed to play alone in the barn so we would still sneak up to do these jumps when our parents were not around. We hoped they would not catch us.<\/div>\r\n
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Alongside the barn was a tall silo which is a tower used for storing cut-up grass called silage that the cows would be given as food in the winter. In some of the photos of the old barn, you can see that there is no silo. Fairy had to build this so it was another important job on his list of things to do. He built our silo when I was about 5 years old. Once I was about 7 years old, John and I climbed up a ladder that was inside the silo and clambered onto the sloped roof of the barn. Nelson, who was only 3 or 4, followed us and managed to climb the ladder as well. The three of us had a good view of the farm from this height. John and I decided to climb even higher leaving Nelson alone. Suddenly, Margot came out of the barn and yelled in horror to see Nelson and us up so high especially Nelson by himself. We got a good lecture about doing such a stupid thing especially for not looking after my little brother. Mostly we were good children but like all kids, we sometimes did things we were not supposed to.<\/div>\r\n
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In the spring, Fairy would plow some fields to plant oats which would be for the cows to eat in the winter. The oats would grow to about one meter high before being harvested. John, Nelson and I would sometimes crawl into the standing oats, trying to do this so nobody would see our trail. Then we would make a small secret circle fort and pathways radiating out by pushing down the oats. This was not a good thing to do because those oats we had trampled would not be able to be harvested. I do not think we did this too many times as we got into big trouble with our parents when they found out.<\/div>\r\n
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The Cook Slough was always a source of fun in the summer when we would go fishing. Because it was very muddy, there were not fish that could be eaten but there were many, many small fish called bullheads that loved to eat worms. Using small fishing rods and worms for bait, we would catch lots of these fish, sometimes twenty in a couple of hours. Because we could not eat them, we threw them back into the slough or fed them to the barn cats. The slough did have another bony fish called carp but maybe they did not like worms because we never did catch any. Blue herons would catch these carp, however, and often we would watch these birds swiftly thrust their long beaks into the water, come up with a carp, and then throw their beak skyward as they hungrily gulped down their meal.<\/div>\r\n
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The slough was an important home for other creatures. Living along the mud banks of the slough and eating the water plants, were many muskrats, small furry water-dwelling animals like small beavers (although muskrats have tails like rats). Also, many wild birds and ducks depended on the slough for food and shelter. And living among the lily pads were colonies of frogs. We used to catch frogs in summer and in spring we would sometimes gather up frog eggs into a bucket of water, in a few days we would have tadpoles swimming about. Then we would put the tadpoles back into the slough so they could grow into frogs. In spring and summer, the evenings would be alive with croaking frog songs. The winter weather was a little colder than it is now so sometimes the slough would freeze over hard enough for us to put on our skates and slide around. In the summer, when I was a teenager, we would build rafts out of short lengths of old telephone poles. Nelson would get out his harmonica and play while sitting in a lawn chair on the raft.<\/div>\r\n
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John and I played baseball catch a lot. John was a much better baseball player than I was when we were very young and his father would play ball with him to improve his game. I used to get upset that Fairy had very little time to practice and play catch with me. At the time, I did not really understand that Fairy had two jobs, the dairy farm and the sawmill whereas John’s father only had the dairy farm. It seemed unfair to me at the time but I later realized Fairy and Margot’s hard work meant that we could have indoor toilets, television, and cars none of which the White family had at that time. My parents labour really paid off for our family. Most families had cars by this time, but Mr. White had been injured in an accident while working at a sawmill and could not work there anymore so they only had income from their small farm and the cost of owning and running a car was out of the question for them.<\/div>\r\n
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We did not go to kindergarten in those days, so grade one was our first experience with school. Edith McDermot was our grade one teacher. John was good at baseball but not so good at reading. It was the opposite for me. I caught on to reading very fast and at the end of grade one I won a prize for being the top student whereas John had to repeat the grade; however, when he was 10 years old he made the Little League baseball team and I did not. (I was not very good at sports until I was a teenager.) When I was 10, I skipped a grade so I was now two grades ahead of John and sadly our close friendship ended because we had friends from our own school classrooms.<\/div>\r\n
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While we did not have ipads, computers, electronic games, or even much to watch on the two television channels, we did have lots of activities to keep us busy. We played board games and cards indoors and had lots of exercise outside. Each year in the early summer, I would run back and forth on the gravel roadway from the house to the barn to toughen up my feet so that I could go barefoot most of the summer. I loved to run across the fields, being careful not to step in cow manure ‘pies’ that dotted all the pastures. Stepping in a cow pie meant that you could slip and fall, and with bare feet you got all that smelly manure squishing up between your toes.<\/div>\r\n
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Nelson and I had fun with the many, many toys given to us by our generous parents. Each Christmas our tree would be loaded to overflowing with presents for us. Margot and Fairy really went all out, probably because they had so little when they were children. Our Christmas tradition involved having our grandmother (Margot’s mother) and step-grandfather drive out to the farm from their home in Vancouver. We could not open presents until they arrived around 10:30 in the morning. It was torture to see the tree piled high with wrapped gifts but the wait was worth it with presents to keep us busy for months to come. One vivid memory that Nelson and I share is waking up on Christmas morning to find shiny red scooters beside all the other gifts under the tree. The scooters proved to be lots of fun as we rode back and forth on our concrete sidewalk and made jumps out of old boards.<\/div>\r\n
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When I was young, the most popular movies and television shows were about the days of the Wild West when cowboys wore guns in hip holsters and there were many stories about gunslingers and gun fights. (When I was 4 years old I won a colouring contest with a prize for the whole family to see one of these ‘western’ movies in a town close to ours.) Margot and Fairy gave us toys which allowed us to pretend we were bad guys or good guys in the olden days. Our guns and holsters were really fancy and probably cost our parents a lot. We were lucky children. We actually had a connection to the Wild West through our step-grandfather whose father had three notches filed into a pistol he owned showing that he had shot three men in gunfights.<\/div>\r\n
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Trains <\/strong><\/div>\r\n
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Not having a car meant that John’s mother would get groceries by walking to the nearest town, Pitt Meadows, which had only two grocery stores: Davie Jones Confectionary and Struthers General Store. In those days, there were no supermarkets like Save On Foods or Country Grocer so people shopped locally at the two small grocery businesses. The quickest way to get to these two stores was by walking the railway tracks which ran along the back of our farm. It would take about half an hour to make it to town. We really were not supposed to walk on the tracks because of the danger from trains but in those days, many people would walk along the rail lines rather than the roadways simply because the straight railroad lines meant shorter distances. Often because John was going with his mother, I would go along too. It was an adventure. The problem was, of course, that sharing these tracks with trains could cause problems for the walkers.<\/div>\r\n
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These were not like the trains you see today. They were called steam engine trains because they used steam from heated water to drive the motors. They burned coal to heat the water and the coal fire meant that there was a long plume of thick black, smelly smoke which poured from the engine’s smokestack, coiling above the train and then drifting down into the fields below, leaving a dirty reminder of the train for many minutes after the train had rushed past. When John’s mother would hear a train coming, she would pull us off to the side of the tracks and hold us out of harm’s way. I always imagined these trains to be mechanical dragons breathing fire and steam and bearing down on us like they were going to gobble us up. When they passed us, the roar was deafening, and we would cough from the smoke.<\/div>\r\n
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Sometimes a repair crew would come by on their work car (called a hand car) which rode on the rail tracks. There would be two workers using levers like a teeter totter which they would pump up and down to propel the car along. Usually, they would just wave at us as they went by but one time they stopped and gave us a ride into town. That was great fun. By the time I was about 6 years old, the steam engines were replaced by diesel engines which were much faster, quieter, and cleaner… no more smoke lingering in our fields.<\/div>\r\n
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At this time, passenger trains were a very popular way to travel in Canada. Very few people could afford to travel in airplanes in those days and there were not very many passenger flights like today. Just after I would go to bed, a passenger train would go by on the tracks along the back of the farm and in the winter when it was dark I could see through my bedroom window the lights in the passenger cars as they rolled by. I would let my mind drift and imagine travelling in one of those magical cars, having adventures and seeing the world. By the time I grew up, however, most people were travelling the world by airplane, although there are still a few special trains that take people across Canada and now there are commuter trains which carry people to and from areas like Pitt Meadows to their work in the city.<\/div>\r\n
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In those early days when I was quite a small boy, there were homeless people called hobos or tramps who would travel from place to place by climbing into empty rail cars to get a free ride. This was illegal and extremely dangerous when tramps jumped on or off a moving box car. These hobos did it anyway as they had no money for other transportation. Because of the rail lines that bordered the edge of our farm, tramps would sometimes jump off the train and come up to our house to ask Margot for food. This made her very nervous and a few times Fairy would find these tramps sheltering in our barn. Margot would often feed them and Fairy would give them a small amount of money for food and they would be on their way. No harm ever came as a result of the hobos, even though Margot was worried about them, and it seemed to John and me that this was an exciting life.<\/div>\r\n
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For fun we would tie a pouch of cloth on the end of a pole and have our mothers fill this with a picnic lunch. We would then ‘tramp’ off to a spot by the slough to eat our lunch and pretend that we were on a grand adventure.<\/div>\r\n
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A Bigger House <\/strong><\/div>\r\n
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If you look back at the photos of the barn and the house, you can see that they look very old and in need of repair. You also know now that Margot and Fairy did not have much money when they started out. They worked diligently and built up the dairy herd so they could make money to buy a farm tractor, get electricity, television, milking machines, and drinking water for the house. As well, they now had two young boys to raise. They still could not afford many things but they were no longer really poor. The two-bedroom house was now too small since Uncle Ken was still there and often Teddy, too, on the weekends. Additionally, Margot and Fairy often would have other friends and relatives stay over during the summer, helping out on the farm and learning about living in the country. With Margot’s large vegetable garden, an orchard of fruit trees, all the milk and eggs as well as pork, beef, and chicken there was always plenty to eat but not enough space for guests sleeping in the house. They needed a new barn, too, but first more bedrooms were necessary with the arrival of baby Nelson.<\/div>\r\n
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To expand the house, Fairy and Margot decided to dig a basement. Over the basement, which extended out the back of the house, Fairy would build two more bedrooms and later a bedroom in the basement under the house. He used jacks to raise the house a little so it could sit on blocks and then had the horses pull a scraper that dug out the dirt to make a large hole under the house. He then mixed concrete and slid it into a wood framework to form the walls of the new basement, and he poured concrete to make the floor. This was a difficult job. It is much easier to construct a basement first and then build a new house over it but Fairy and Margot did not have enough money for a new house. This would have to do.<\/div>\r\n
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Two new bedrooms were built and were connected by a secret closet passageway. You could go into the bedroom closet with all the clothes hanging down and then push through the clothes to emerge in the other bedroom. This was great fun for Nelson and me because if we had friends or cousins over, we could go into one bedroom, quickly go through the secret closet and emerge in the other room. The other children would be puzzled as to how we would be able to disappear and then reappear behind them. The new basement was fine until winter set in, with its very rainy weather. The level of the slough beside the house would rise so that it was higher than the walls of the basement. You can guess what might happen. Water started to pour into the new basement. For a couple of winters the basement was always flooded and the water was deep enough for me to play with toy boats and splash around in my gumboots. Fun for me, but this was not what had been planned for the basement. Fairy came up with a solution. He broke apart the concrete floor in one corner and installed a sump pump. This pump would pull the water from below the basement floor just before the water level was high enough to cause a problem. An automatic switch would start the pump running. The basement stayed dry from then on.<\/div>\r\n
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A few years later, my bedroom was built with this sump pump under a cupboard in the corner of my room. This pump made a very loud noise, first, a sucking sound that I imagined was a monster pulling itself out of the mud and then a rough roar as if the monster was angry that it was trapped under the cupboard. I was not really afraid as I knew what the sound was, but my imagination painted some very interesting pictures of the sump pump monster. If any guests slept over in our house we had to warn them about the ‘monster’ in the basement. The outside of the house needed lots of work, too. If you look at the pictures, you will see weathered wood and small windows that were not very attractive. One of my school friends was visiting one day and he told me that our house looked like a barn. No one that I knew lived in a house that looked as poor as ours. I used to dream of having a new house that I could be proud of and one that friends would not teach me about; however, fixing the outside of the house was not a priority for Fairy and Margot as they had to do something about the old barn first.<\/div>\r\n
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A New Barn<\/strong><\/div>\r\n
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The old barn was simply not large enough to increase the size of the dairy herd so that Fairy and Margot could make enough money to buy necessary farm equipment and to fix up their house more. The old barn had another problem other than being too small. The roof leaked and when it snowed there was a dangerous possibility that it might collapse. Winters were colder when I was a small boy. This meant a lot of work to shovel snow from the roof of the barn to prevent a catastrophe. Fairy had plans drawn up for a larger and much more modern barn. This one would have a round metal roof so the snow would slide off on its own. The inside of the barn would accommodate more milk cows and the haymow would not be above the milking parlour making it easier to drop bales down to feed the cows rather than having to drag them from the back of the barn. (By this time, we no longer had loose hay but had hay baled to make it easier to handle and better to store over winter.)<\/div>\r\n
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Fairy and Margot did not have enough money to build such a modern barn but, before building one, Fairy made a good business decision. Just before the school year opened in 1957, there was a far in the refurbished and about to be reopened Number One Schoolhouse that had been closed for a few years but was an original elementary school in Pitt Meadows. Fairy saw that really only the roof had been badly damaged and he put in a lowball bid of $200 to salvage and demolish the school, seeing an opportunity for building materials for the new barn. This proved to be an excellent move as he won the contract with the salvage operation providing many of the building supplies for the new barn (plus an oil furnace for our house).<\/div>\r\n
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Construction started in the spring of 1958. The back of the old barn with the haymow and horse stalls were torn down first, leaving the milking parlour in the front. (Cows still needed to be milked but this was now spring so they did not need to be fed hay so the haymow could go temporarily). It was a very exciting time when the barn was being built. Many neighbours came to help out and one neighbour, Jack Cleave, was a master carpenter so he took over as boss for the construction. In those days, farming families helped each other without being paid. Constructing a new barn was a very special event called a ‘barn raising’ and other farmers would help because they knew that someday they might need help in building their own barn.<\/div>\r\n
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Margot was as busy as the barn workers because she had to prepare lunch and sometimes dinner feasts for these hungry helpers. It was a matter of pride for farm wives in times of haying or barn raising that the volunteer workers would be fed large and delicious meals. Margot went all out and the dining table would be filled to overflowing with an assortment of main course and dessert dishes. On one weekend of barn raising, she baked 8 pies!<\/div>\r\n
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I loved these meals as the men would tell stories about times when they had been logging and farming, often highlighting the adventures with their horse teams. One uncle was particularly good at these tales, recalling times when his small but powerful Morgan horse could outperform even those big Clydesdales. He would be others that the horse could pull a big log that no one else though possible and he would always win… or so he told us.<\/div>\r\n
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The new barn was built over the summer. It had lots of windows salvaged from the school and many modern features besides the round metal roof. The new barn had a haymow that was on the floor above the milking parlour. The floor was constructed of cedar flooring from the school. The bales of hay for the cows could now be tossed down through a hole in the haymow floor.<\/div>\r\n
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One day, Nelson was too close to the hole and lost his balance. Suddenly he fell about 3 meters and might have been killed had there not been a bale of hay on the concrete floor below. He crashed onto the bale and was stunned but seemed to be o.k. That night he had a very sore neck and throat and Margot and Fairy thought he was swollen from the landing on the bale. The next morning, however, it turned out that he had the mumps which is a childhood disease that causes such swelling. (Now kids are vaccinated against getting the mumps so it is very rare but when Nelson and I were children, it was a common disease. You would be sick for a week.)<\/div>\r\n
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I loved the metal barn roof because it made such a lovely thrumb, thrumb, thrumb sound in the haymow when it rained. Nelson and I had so much fun playing tag with our friends and cousins, climbing on the bales, and building forts. And Fairy never had to shovel snow off the barn roof again.<\/div>\r\n
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A Still Better House<\/strong><\/div>\r\n
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The new barn was a terrific addition to our more prosperous farm but I still longed for a new house. Finally, when I was about 11, Fairy and Teddy did many improvements inside the house making a much larger living room and new dining area. Margot got a new laundry room with a new clothes washer and a dryer (prior to this she dried all the clothes on a clothesline outside or on a rack suspended over the sawdust-burning stove in the kitchen.) She even bought a dishwasher for the kitchen, an appliance that was rather rare in most homes at the time. A new coat of stucco greatly improved the look of the exterior and large windows provided spectacular views of the Coast Mountains. We even had a carport built to house our car and a chest freezer there to store our food. I felt pretty good because now that the new barn was finished, and our house was fixed up at last, no one would call our house a ‘barn’. To me, it seemed like forever that we had to endure such an impoverished-looking home, but Fairy and Margot had been patient, always making sure that they had enough funds for the next important project.<\/div>\r\n
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Visitors Coming <\/strong><\/div>\r\n
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The road into the farm was a long straight stretch of gravel and nearly every weekend relatives and friends would ‘drop in’. We never knew who was coming but when the weather was dry we could see clouds of dust from the cars as they came down the road and we would try to figure out who our next visitors would be. When they arrived, Fairy would stop to chat for a few minutes and then would need to get back to the job he was doing on the farm. Margot would always visit and then would invite these unexpected but welcome visitors to stay for supper (which most would do). Afterwards, Fairy would be able to have longer conversations over a meal and later after milking the cows. It was nice now to have a house big enough to have these large dinners and I really enjoyed the conversations and discussions on wide-ranging topics which were an important part of any visit. Margot and Fairy loved to entertain and we had many big parties over the years. Margot always made sure that people were comfortable and had more than enough to eat. Both Fairy and Margot thought that helping others was one of the best things in life so our parents were very popular with family and their many friends. Fairy liked to tease people and have fun in a good-natured way. One of his favourite tricks was to give guests a ‘dribble’ water glass which had an almost invisible hole in the side and when someone unsuspecting drank from it, water would dribble onto them, much to Fairy’s delight. Fairy had an excellent sense of humour.<\/div>\r\n
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Our home was always filled with laughter. Our family dinners were a time to share stories and discuss current events. When guests were there, Nelson and I were always included in the conversations. The conversations were as wide-ranging as the people themselves. Friends included farmers, medical professionals, store owners, pharmacists, local politicians, tradespeople, mill workers… an eclectic mix, all welcomed by Fairy and Margot who relished this varied company. Often visitors included cousins who were about my age and my parents would ask me to look after them, showing them around the farm or playing in the haymow. Mostly this was fun but there were three trouble-making cousins who I hated to see visit. They would chase the cows or chickens, try to do very dangerous things like starting fires or smoking cigarettes in the barn and even attempt to start the tractor to take it for a joy ride. I had to stop them from causing such trouble. After they would leave I would plead with my parents not to make me supervise them again. Thankfully, these cousins were infrequent visitors. Years later when we were grown up, all three of these ‘bad’ cousins ended up in jail. Not surprising!<\/div>\r\n
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Food for the Cows and for the People <\/strong><\/div>\r\n
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The whole purpose of farms is to produce food to sell and use for yourself. And you have to grow the crops to feed the animals. Farms need healthy pastures and hay fields. These do not come without care and attention by the farmers who require equipment to till the soil, fertilize the land, seed the crops, and harvest the grain and hay. Farmers also need tools to maintain their equipment, fix fences, build storage sheds, and do all the other necessary jobs to make a dairy farm work properly. Fairy and Margot started their farm with some horse-drawn equipment but as they began working with a tractor rather than Dobbin and Blackie they need equipment which would be pulled by the tractor. Some of the horse equipment could be adapted to be pulled by a tractor while some new ones would have to be purchased. Fairy was good friends with a machinist, Hans Hoffmann who had a machine shop near the end of Advent Road. Hans was a very shy man but he liked Fairy and helped by fixing some equipment to be able to be used with the tractor. Hans Hoffmann’s machine shop is now part of the Pitt Meadows Museum. Once more, Fairy and Margot had to save money to improve the tools so that their farm could be more productive. And as with other necessary farm needs, it was quite a few years before our parents had all the farm equipment they needed but from where they started out, they made amazing progress.<\/div>\r\n
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One of Fairy’s early purchases was an old dump truck which he converted for use in picking up baled hay in the fields. When I was 11 years old, Fairy had me driving this big truck to help with the haying. He put blocks on the brake and clutch pedals so I could reach them with my feet, and put the truck into a very low gear so it would only go extremely slow. I would steer the truck between the hay bales while Fairy and a crew of helpers would load the hay. I really felt important and I will be that none of you would even think that you could drive a large truck at the age of 11. This was almost as good as leading Dobbin to put the hay into the haymow. As the milk herd grew, there was enough grass for pasture, but not enough to grow hay for the winter. Fairy solved this problem by leasing 80 acres of property to grow the hay. This large field is now the home of a golf driving range in Pitt Meadows, and for me, it was the training ground to learn to drive the hay truck.<\/div>\r\n
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Fairy also rented pasture from two nearby farms: first, one owned by Doug and Vi McMyn and later another, owned by Kid and Dolly Howe. This pasture was needed for a growing herd of beef cows. With this rented property, the working farm was now over 100 acres. Fairy had confidence in me but I could not always live up to his expectations. When I was 12 years old, he asked me to drive our car home from the same spot that he had sent me home on top of Dobbin. I was a bit nervous but thought I could do it since my father was right behind me on our tractor. I was fine until I came to a small narrow bridge over a slough leading into our farm. As I approached in the car, it seemed to me in my imagination that the bridge was too narrow and I was afraid to keep driving. I panicked and slammed on the brakes sliding the car sideways on the gravel road, stopping just before heading over a bank into the slough. Fairy realized that I was just too young to be driving a car, and this time he did not need a scolding from Margot to let him know. I still got to drive the truck for haying, though.<\/div>\r\n
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A Pitt Meadows Farm Story by Larry Gray
A Pitt Meadows Farm Story by Larry Gray
When I was a small boy, Pitt Meadows had many dairy farms but only a few people living there…My mother, Margot Marion Pollock, was the third of six children. She was born in Maple Ridge in March of 1924 and went to school there until she had to leave in grade 10 to stay home to take care of her sister and her two young brothers because her mother had to return to work… Margot loved to read and she enjoyed playing with her brothers and younger sister on the family chicken farm. Margot said that she always liked playing with boys’ toys rather than girls’. She did not have a bike but would sometimes borrow her brother’s and would ride to swim in the Alouette River, five kilometres away. When she was 11 years old, she was given some seeds by her teacher and grew a vegetable garden. In the fall fair, she won a number of prizes for her vegetables and an overall prize for her garden. Margot was a slim, attractive young woman who was chosen as Miss Canada by the Maple Ridge Legion when she was a teenager. She rode in a car in the May Day parade and had to give a speech. She said she was nervous but proud that she was able to do this.
My father, Carswell Lothian Gray, was born in November of 1915 in New Westminster into a family of 9 children. He had a twin brother named Alfred Thomas. My grandmother named my father after Dr. Carswell who delivered him and then gave my dad her surname, Lothian. This always seemed unfair to my father who ended up with such an unusual name when his brother got a normal-sounding name. When the twins came home from the hospital, they looked alike except my father had light-coloured hair and his brother had dark hair so they were nicknamed ‘Fairy’ and ‘Darky’. For the rest of their lives, the twins were only known by these nicknames…so there you have it. The fairy in this story was my father, who hated to be called Carswell, always preferring to be known as Fairy Gray.
As a young boy, Fairy was a good student, especially in arithmetic, and he was a fast runner. His nickname was ‘Greyhound’ because of his skill at running and, of course, because of his surname. He was an amateur boxer as a teenager and once fought against his twin brother in a match which was declared a tie by the judges. When he was 13, Fairy’s mother took Fairy out of school, even though he showed promise as a clever pupil. Fairy’s older sister, Etta, and her husband, Alred, offered to take him in so he could continue his education. Fairy’s mother insisted, however, that he quit school so that he could go to work in order to bring in money for the family which was facing very hard times because Fairy’s father had been killed at Vimy Ridge. Fairy went to work for Alred, helping to pick up milk from the dairy farms in Chilliwack.
So both of my parents were forced to leave school at an early age and each worked a variety of jobs as teenagers. Fairy was a plumber for a while but left that profession because he did not like climbing under old houses to connect pipes. Margot worked in canning factories, making jam. Margot and Fairy met one day while Margot was babysitting Darky’s children. At the time, Fairy had just lost his first wife, Hazel, who had died in 1945 after a long illness. Hazel Cook was a granddaughter of English farming settlers, Edward and Annie Cook, who came to Pitt Meadows in the late 1800’s. Margot was recently divorced from her first husband who did not return home after serving in World War Two. They started dating and in 1946 they were married. Margot was 22 years old and Fairy was 30. So they were both starting over with their lives and were probably very excited about the prospects for their future.
Fairy owned a small farm in Pitt Meadows. When he first bought it, the farm was about 50 acres but Fairy had sold half of it to pay for his former wife’s medical bills. Mr. Tulley, who sold the farm to Fairy, had been in the hospital for a few years and also had to give up his farm to pay medical bills. In those days there was no government medical insurance like there is now and people had to pay doctors for any treatment if they got sick. The farm had been abandoned for some time when Fairy bought it so everything had to be repaired. There was an old run-down house, a barn and a few sheds. Margot said that cows that had been roaming inside the house so it must have been pretty messed up. The house and barn had no electricity, no water that could be used for drinking, no telephone and there were no farm animals.
Originally, the house had been a church hall owned by a group called the Seventh Day Adventists who built it around 1900 and then abandoned it around 1914. Mr. Tulley dragged the building by horses about 1.5 km down the road to his farm. The road to the farm was named Advent Road after the church congregation. The farm was at the end of a dead-end road so Mr. Tulley called the last stretch of road into his farm Tulley Road. When I was a young child, we could use either Tulley Road or Advent Road as our address and the people at the post office would make sure the mail made it to us. Now it is just Advent Road but Mr. Tulley’s name has not been forgotten as there is a slough nearby the farm which has been named after him. It was time for Fairy and Margot to begin putting the farm back into working order.
If this was your farm, what would you think needed to be done first? Get drinking water, buy some milk cows, hook up electricity, get a phone, buy farming equipment, fix up the house and barn? All of these things would cost quite a lot and Fairy and Margot did not have any extra money so they would have to work at other jobs and find ways for their farm to make money for them. Fairy worked as a shingle sawyer in Hammond Cedar Mill making shingles and shakes for roofing. Margot worked in a local peat plant cutting bales of peat to be used for burning in stoves or for gardening. These two jobs provided enough money for them to start saving to rebuild their farm.
Milk Cows
First on Margot and Fairy’s list was to make the house habitable with some minor repairs, so that was something they did immediately, but if you guessed that getting milk cows was one of the most important things on their ‘to-do ‘ list then you were right. Margot and Fairy decided that the number one priority was to buy some milk cows to start their dairy farm. Their first cow was called Blossom and my mother always spoke fondly of her. She said that Blossom was a very pretty cow with big brown eyes. Soon other cows were purchased and a small milk herd of about 12 cows produced milk which could be sold to make money. Fairy and Margot worked very hard at their day jobs but also had to spend about an hour milking the cows very early in the morning and again at night. On weekends they made some repairs on the house and barn and rebuilt fences around the property. With a small herd of cows, the farm began to produce some money through milk sales. The expensive things like electricity and water would have to wait until they could afford them. Fairy and Margot must have been exhausted at the end of the day, but they also must have felt very happy with the progress they were making. Soon after Margot and Fairy were married, Margot’s 14-year-old brother, Ken, came to live with them on the farm. Uncle Ken is now 89 years old and lives in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. He remembers asking if he could help milk the cows when he first arrived but was not allowed to do so until he was about 15. After school and on weekends he still could assist with many farm chores, however, and was a big help to Margot and Fairy.
Born in a Flood
As well as fixing up the farm, Fairy and Margot wanted to start a family and two years after they were married I was born. The timing of my birth was a problem because it happened during a very famous and terrible Fraser River flood. When they knew it was time for me to come into the world, they drove to the hospital in New Westminster which was about an hour away. Their car had to splash through water which was across some roads so it must have been quite frightening for both parents. Fairy left Margot in the hospital, and, because of the rising waters of the flood, he drove back home to let the cows out of the fields so they could go onto the higher ground of the railroad tracks which were on the northern border of the farm. Hopefully, they would not be caught in the flood. Luckily, the water did not rise to a dangerous level on our farm so the cows were safe. We have not had another flood as bad since that time, over 70 years ago.
So I entered the world at an exciting time. And a very, very different place than the world today. Can you guess at some of the changes? The rest of the story will introduce you to some of the important differences between then and now.
The Magic of Electricity
If you guessed that one of the first things needed on the farm after getting cows would be electricity, then you were right but to get electrical service brought to the farm, Margot and Fairy would need to save money from the milk they sold to pay for the electrical poles to be erected. It took about five years, by the time I was three years old before they could afford electrical service. Ken remembers Fairy asking him to look down the line of power poles to make sure they were straight as they were being installed. Just think how wonderful that must have been for Margot and Fairy. Up to this point, they had to use lanterns or candles to see anything in the house or the barn after dark. Once Margot moved their bed without telling Fairy. As it was dark in the house on winter nights, Fairy went into the bedroom and jumped into bed where he expected it to be. He had a rude shock as he landed on the floor. He probably used some bad language!
Before getting electricity, Margot used to warm my baby bottles on a gas lantern and she would sometimes read by the lantern in the winter evenings. With no electricity, there were no washing machines and Margot would have used a scrub board to wash clothes and my diapers. Margot and Fairy’s lives were transformed with electricity. Reading by electric lights at night. Listening to the radio. Having hot water come out of the tap without having to heat it on the stove (which burned sawdust for heat). Being able to buy a clothes washing machine so that clothes would not have to be washed by hand. Being able to buy a fridge to keep food from spoiling. (Without electricity, people had ice boxes to store food and had to buy blocks of ice just like we do when camping today.) We take all these things for granted now, but life would have changed so much for Fairy and Margot with the connection to electricity.
The Gift of Water
The next priority for Fairy and Margot was for safe drinking water. One of the biggest differences today was that the farm had no ‘city’ drinking water like we now have in our homes, where we just turn on a tap and out comes the water that we can pour into a glass. There was a slow-running steam called a slough that ran alongside the house but the water was not fit to drink. This slough has now been named Cook Slough after Hazel’s pioneering grandparents. Slough water could be used for doing some cleaning and for giving water to animals but drinking water for people was brought in large milk cans from another farm that had city water. This drinking water was kept in a storage can on the porch leading into the house. If you wanted a drink, you used a small pot with a handle, called a dipper that you dipped into the can and then poured the water into a cup. Water from the slough was pumped into the house but at first, there was no proper bathroom with a toilet and bathtub.
To bathe, Margot and Fairy used a large tin tub and heated water on their sawdust-burning kitchen stove. One afternoon Margot was taking a bath in the kitchen when she thought she heard the wind rattling the front door. She called out, ‘Just come in,’ as a joke and much to her embarrassed surprise, Alan Howe, from a neighbouring farm walked in. After that, Margot insisted that a proper bathroom be built even though they did not yet have city water to drink. To get water to the farm, Margot and Fairy had to pay for pipes to bring the water and, just like for electricity, they did not yet have enough money so they had to save for a few years. I was about four years old when city water arrived and we could finally retire the dipper and drink water right from the tap. This was a wonderful improvement for me and my parents. Without running tap water, some people had no toilets, so these people had outhouses similar to the ones you now find only in camping parks. Although by the time I was born, most people did have indoor toilets, not every farm had functioning bathrooms. The farm next to ours still used an outhouse until I was about 10 years old. Since their outhouse was outside their home, they used a ‘chamber pot’ if they had to ‘go’ in the middle of the night. This meant a rather smelly chamber pot needed to be emptied into the outhouse every morning. Yuck.
Fairy used to tell stories about when boys would play tricks on girls who would be using the outhouse at their elementary school. Since the outhouse was away from the main building, they would sneak around to the back of the outhouse, when girls were inside, and then make scary sounds or even push up against the outside to frighten the girls. The girls would tell their teacher and the boys would get in trouble and have to do extra chores like chopping wood for their classroom stove or cleaning the front steps of the school.
Milking Machines Could Help
In the early days of their farm, Margot, Fairy and Ken had to milk the cows by hand. This is done by sitting on a stool, holding a milk pail between your legs, and using your hands to squeeze teats on the cow's udder. Each cow’s udder has four teats. To get milk, you pull with one hand on one teat and then pull with your other hand on the second teat, up and down, up and down until one-half of the udder is empty, before starting the third and fourth teats. Prior to milking the cow, the udder has to be washed carefully to make sure the milk is kept clean during the milking process. All this takes time, probably an hour for two people to milk 12 cows. Cows need to be milked twice a day so Margot and Fairy had to get up at 5:30 in the morning to do the first milking and then do another milking in the evening after dinner. When the morning milking was finished, Margot would go to the house to cook breakfast while Fairy washed up all the milking equipment. Following breakfast, Fairy would go to work in the sawmill and before I was born Margot would go to work cutting and stacking peat.
After her work at the peat plant, Margot would come home to cook supper and when Fairy arrived back from the sawmill, they would eat dinner and then both would go to the barn to milk the cows. Fairy would clean out the cow manure in the barn every day and he would feed the cows in the winter when they stayed inside the barn. Margot would also have to do other chores like cleaning the house, cooking meals, cleaning dishes and washing clothes by hand as there was no electricity for a clotheswasher. It was a hard life and they were surely very tired by the end of every day. And cows must be milked 7 days a week! They do not take time off on the weekends. In the springs, summer and fall the cows graze in the fields called pastures but they come into the barn to be milked. Fairy would call out ‘Kooboss, Kooboss’ several times and the cows would parade in a line toward the barn, being led by the ‘mother cow’ who was the boss of the herd. When they got to the barn, they would go to a stall where they would be fed some grain and locked into a stanchion, a set of bars that went around their necks so that they would stand still when they were being fed or milked.
After Ken started milking cows, Margot was able to stop milking the cows so she could look after me as I was still a tiny baby but she had many other farm chores, besides being a busy mother, for example: feeding the chickens, gathering eggs, looking after the housework, cooking meals and tending a large vegetable garden. When I was a little boy, I hated that we had to always be home by 4:00 in the afternoon to have our dinner and then milk the cows.
Sometimes on weekends we would go to a beach or go on picnics with other families but we always had to leave before others so we could get home to do the milking chores. During the early years, we were unable to go away for many vacations because someone would need to milk the cows. By the time I was about 9 years old, however, we finally started going on regular one or two-week summer camping trips when an aunt and uncle would look after the farm, but short weekend trips were never possible. Our family was always tied to the demands of the dairy farm. I vowed never to become a dairy farmer when I grew up. After getting electricity, Fairy and Margot started saving money to buy two milking machines so they would not have to spend so much time milking the cows by hand. These machines had suction cups that fit over the cow's four teats and pulled the milk from their udders. While the milking machines were faster at milking the cows, each animal had to have the last bit of milk stripped from the udders and this needed to be done by hand so it still took two people to do the milking. Over the next 10 years, the milk herd grew from just one Blossom to about 20 milk cows. This meant more money coming in for other much-needed farm equipment.
Each morning the full milk cans would be placed outside on a platform where a milk truck driven by Doug McMyn, a member of another Pitt Meadows pioneer family, would come to haul them off to the plant where the milk would be pasteurized. This pasteurization involves heating the milk up to a high temperature to kill any germs or bacteria so the milk is safe to be sold in stores. Fairy and Margot belonged to a company that paid them for their milk. This company then sold the pasteurized milk to the stores. And that is pretty much the same process that is in place today, although the milk farms are much, much bigger now and small operations like our farm no longer exist. To make farms profitable, milk herds are often in the hundreds or even thousands of cows.
A Baby Brother
When I was nearly four years old, my mother gave birth to another baby boy, they named Nelson. Since this was just about the time to get running water and electricity, life was rapidly changing for Fairy and Margot. Nelson was a happy, healthy baby who loved drinking milk. This was a good thing on a dairy farm where there was lots of milk. Unlike Nelson, when I was a baby, I had difficulty drinking cow milk and as I grew up I never liked the taste of milk, much to the dismay of my parents As a young child, Nelson showed a talent for music and was able to make people laugh with funny stories. It is not surprising that even now, Nelson is good at writing and telling stories and entertaining people with his guitar and singing.
Before many years had passed, Ken had grown up and left the farm so Margot again would go to the barn morning and night to help milk the cows and I would stay in the house to look after Nelson. Sometimes one of Darky’s sons, Teddy, would come to live with us on weekends. He was 8 years older than I was and, when he was 15, he came to live full-time on our farm. He then helped out with the milking and all the other farm chores. He was a big help to Margot and Fairy and was like a much older brother to Nelson and me.
Telephones and Party Lines
In the early years of the farm, we had no telephone so if you needed to talk to someone by phone, you needed to walk or drive to a neighbour to ask to borrow their phone. After getting electricity, we then had the poles to string the phone wires into our house. Phones then were very different from those of today. There were no cell phones, and families only had one telephone which was often attached to a wall inside the house. Most people did not have a private phone line. Several families would be connected together on a ‘party line’. When the phone rang, everyone on the party line would hear the ring, but each house had its own ring. For example, two short rings might mean the call was for your house, while a short and long ring might mean it was for someone down the road. If you wanted to phone out, you would pick up the receiver and listen to see if anyone was talking. The polite thing to do if someone was ‘on the line’ was to hang up and try later. If it was an emergency, you could just ask the people on the line to hang up so that you could make your call. This party line enabled some people to quietly and secretly listen in on others' conversations without the people on the phone call knowing. We had one old woman on our party line who would very quietly pick up her phone even though the ring was for us. She did this so softly that we could not hear that she was ‘listening in’. After the call, she would often gossip to others about what we had been saying. This infuriated my mother and father, who often told her to stop, but she continued anyway. It was a big relief when we got a private line when I was about 12 years old.
Radio and TV
Electricity also meant that we could listen to the radio. This was before television was invented for ordinary homes. We would sit around the radio and listen to music or programs for adults, like the news, or for kids, like storytime. When I was about 8 years old, we bought our first television. It had a small screen in black and white and there were only two channels, nothing like the wonderful TVs we have today with hundreds of channels, remote controls and high-definition colour pictures. Those first old black and white televisions seemed magical though at that time, and we were one of the first people in our area to get one. On Saturday nights for the first while, it was such a novelty that Margot and Fairy invited people from Advent Road to come and watch. Sometimes 10 or 12 people would visit and we would set viewing chairs out in our living room like a movie theatre. Getting a TV was a really big step for my parents. Up to this point, when they had no electricity or running tap water, they would have been considered quite poor, but the tv meant that all their hard work was starting to pay off. I remember feeling really proud that we were able to afford a television before a lot of other folks.
Work Horses
We had more than just cows on our farm. At first, Fairy and Margot could not afford a tractor, so just like electricity and water, they had to save up money. It was cheaper but a lot slower to have horses to do the farm work like plowing the fields or cutting and storing hay for the winter. In the early years, up until the time I was about 5 years old, we had two large workhorses, one named Dobbin and the other called Blackie. These horses were a breed called Clydesdales, known for being smart and strong but very gentle. Dobbin was very well-behaved, while Blackie was sometimes a problem, and I always thought maybe that was how he got his name, however, it was more likely because he was a black horse.
Dobbin was a chestnut colour with a white blaze on the front of his head. These horses were very powerful and did all sorts of work on the farm. Blackie would behave himself better when he was hitched up with Dobbin who set a good example. During the spring, summer and early autumn, cows eat grass in the pastures but in the winter, they were brought into the barn to spend all day and night in their stanchion. This means that in the summer, farmers must cut and dry the tall grass in hay fields and then store this dried hay for feeding the animals in the winter. When Fairy and Margot first put up hay for the winter, it was not baled but was ‘loose’. The hay would be cut and stacked in fields and then a team of horses would be driven around the fields where men with pitchforks would ‘pitch’ the hay onto wagons. When the hay was brought to the barn it would be lifted off the wagon by a very large pitchfork that was stuck into the hay and then pulled up to the hayloft by a pulley. A rope was tied to Dobbin's harness and he pulled this heavy load until the hay was in position to be dropped into the hayloft. It would take several lifts like this to unload the whole wagon. At the age of 4, Fairy gave me the job of walking alongside Dobbin and holding a rope attached to his bridle. My father would call out ‘Whoa’ when he wanted Dobbin to stop and I would tug on the rope. Dobbin would always stop and I felt that I was doing an important job. Later when I was older I realized that Dobbin was a smart, well-trained horse and he would always stop when Fairy called ‘Whoa’. He really did not need me, but it was nice for my father to let me think I was helping out.
One day when I was four years old, my father and I were at a neighbour’s place with the two horses. It was about one kilometre from our house. He hoisted me up onto Dobbin and told the horse to go home with me sitting on this horse so large I could only fit my legs around its neck. Fairy felt this was quite safe because Dobbin was so well-behaved and smart enough to return to our farmyard. Fairy followed along riding Blackie, but he was a few minutes behind so I arrived at our barnyard all alone. Margot saw me and immediately got me down from Dobbin. She was very angry with Fairy for sending a little boy home on his own on such a large animal. Margot made sure that I never got to ride home alone again. The next year, Fairy and Margot bought their first tractor and sold the horses. Tractors could do more work faster than horses and you did not have to feed and groom them but I missed the big workhorses who had such a nice warm ‘horsey’ smell and who always liked it when you gave them an apple or handful or hay.
Other farm animals
Besides the cows and horses, we had other animals on our farm. Sometimes we had pigs and we always had chickens. Margot looked after the chickens and we had more eggs than we could eat so Margot would sell these eggs to make some more money. One of my first farm chores was helping to feed the chickens and collect eggs. We also had some white ducks that swam in the slough that ran alongside our farm. I remember having turkeys one year but many of them got sick and died so we did not try to raise turkeys again. To feed the dairy cows, there was the hay and grain that was kept in the barn. This cow feed attracted mice and rats, so to keep the population of rodents under control we had ‘barn cats’. They were not pets that were allowed in the house and they were quite wild, not letting anyone near to pet them. When he milked the cows, Fairy would give these cats a bowl of warm milk, but other than that, the cats would have to hunt mice for their food. Sometimes, when Fairy was milking cows, a barn cat would walk up behind the cow and Fairy would squirt a stream of milk at the cat who quickly learned to open its mouth to catch the milk. This was a waste of good milk but it was a bit of fun for Fairy and the cat.
Farm Pets
We had pets, too. Sometimes we had one or two pet cats who lived in the house and were fed milk and cat food. These cats, of course, were tame and loved to be petted. When I was very little, we had a dog named Jiggs. He was trained to hunt ducks and pheasants. When Fairy shot a duck of pheasant, Jiggs would run to fetch it for him. That would be a cheap dinner. A problem though was that Jiggs thought chickens were like birds he would hunt and sometimes he would chase the chickens when Margot was feeding them. One day, Jiggs got into the chicken pen when Margot was not there and killed several chickens. Fairy thought they would have to get rid of the dog but Ken suggested tying a dead chicken around Jigg’s neck to teach him a lesson. This idea worked. Jiggs got the message and never chased or killed any chickens again.
Dogs, like people, do not live forever and after Jiggs died from old age, we tried out a few dogs before we found one that was a good pet and a good farm dog. His name was Prince and he was a small terrier. He would run extremely fast for a small dog and he was very smart. We taught Prince many tricks but one thing he just knew how to do because of his breed was chasing and killing rats (and mice, too). Rats are so much bigger than mice that the barn cats tended not to catch them, but Prince was fearless in his pursuit of the rats which were a real problem, eating our cows grain and the chicken feed. It took him about three years but Prince managed to get rid of all the rats on the farm. Very good dog! Prince was my special friend. He went everywhere with me and on the farm and was a great companion. Sometimes there is a strong bond between a boy and his dog and there most certainly was one between Prince and myself.
We sometimes had rabbits for pets, too. We kept rabbits in cages and only let them out onto grass once in a while. We were always afraid that they might run away and one actually did, but he did not go far. He just dug burrows and tunnels under the chicken house to make a home for himself. He was too fast for us to catch but he was a pet nonetheless, a large white rabbit with pink eyes. We called him “Hoppenstopper” because when we would chase him he would ‘hop’ out of our reach and then ‘stop’ to look back at us. Hoppenstopper became a favourite because he learned to help out when feeding the chickens in the evening when the chickens had to be chased back into their hen house. Hoppenstopper loved to eat the wheat that we fed the chickens and he learned that he would get a handful of wheat after the chickens were all inside. Soon he was helping to herd chickens into their house so he could get his treat. He was a really smart rabbit. In the spring when young calves were out in the field, Hoppenstopper would sometimes play with them. He would go up to them and paw at their noses and then run away to make them chase him. He was quite the rabbit. I really enjoyed having him as a pet even as one we could not actually ‘pet’.
Nelson had his own special pet budgies (small parrot-like birds) which lived in birdcages our farmhouse. Sometimes Nelson would let them out of their cages to let them sit on his finger. Usually, they would then take off to fly around the house much to Margot’s displeasure and we would have to chase them around to catch them and put them back in their cages. Sometimes they would escape the house and fly off never to be seen again.
Friends
Our farm was at the end of a road and our neighbours were about one kilometre away, so it was not like living on a street where there were lots of children to play with. Across the fields there was another farm, however, and there was a boy, John White, the same age as me. When I was a small boy, my parents and his were the best of friends so we used to play together all the time. One of our earliest favourite games was jumping in the haymow into the loose hay. Our old barn had a kind of platform like a wide shelf above the hay and running along one side of the haymow. It was very old and had some dangerous broken flooring but if we climbed up on this unsafe platform, we could jump down about 3 or 4 meters into the soft hay, causing a plume of dust to fly up and sometimes burying us in the hay. We were warned not to do this as the platform was dangerous, but we were allowed to play alone in the barn so we would still sneak up to do these jumps when our parents were not around. We hoped they would not catch us.
Alongside the barn was a tall silo which is a tower used for storing cut-up grass called silage that the cows would be given as food in the winter. In some of the photos of the old barn, you can see that there is no silo. Fairy had to build this so it was another important job on his list of things to do. He built our silo when I was about 5 years old. Once I was about 7 years old, John and I climbed up a ladder that was inside the silo and clambered onto the sloped roof of the barn. Nelson, who was only 3 or 4, followed us and managed to climb the ladder as well. The three of us had a good view of the farm from this height. John and I decided to climb even higher leaving Nelson alone. Suddenly, Margot came out of the barn and yelled in horror to see Nelson and us up so high especially Nelson by himself. We got a good lecture about doing such a stupid thing especially for not looking after my little brother. Mostly we were good children but like all kids, we sometimes did things we were not supposed to.
In the spring, Fairy would plow some fields to plant oats which would be for the cows to eat in the winter. The oats would grow to about one meter high before being harvested. John, Nelson and I would sometimes crawl into the standing oats, trying to do this so nobody would see our trail. Then we would make a small secret circle fort and pathways radiating out by pushing down the oats. This was not a good thing to do because those oats we had trampled would not be able to be harvested. I do not think we did this too many times as we got into big trouble with our parents when they found out.
The Cook Slough was always a source of fun in the summer when we would go fishing. Because it was very muddy, there were not fish that could be eaten but there were many, many small fish called bullheads that loved to eat worms. Using small fishing rods and worms for bait, we would catch lots of these fish, sometimes twenty in a couple of hours. Because we could not eat them, we threw them back into the slough or fed them to the barn cats. The slough did have another bony fish called carp but maybe they did not like worms because we never did catch any. Blue herons would catch these carp, however, and often we would watch these birds swiftly thrust their long beaks into the water, come up with a carp, and then throw their beak skyward as they hungrily gulped down their meal.
The slough was an important home for other creatures. Living along the mud banks of the slough and eating the water plants, were many muskrats, small furry water-dwelling animals like small beavers (although muskrats have tails like rats). Also, many wild birds and ducks depended on the slough for food and shelter. And living among the lily pads were colonies of frogs. We used to catch frogs in summer and in spring we would sometimes gather up frog eggs into a bucket of water, in a few days we would have tadpoles swimming about. Then we would put the tadpoles back into the slough so they could grow into frogs. In spring and summer, the evenings would be alive with croaking frog songs. The winter weather was a little colder than it is now so sometimes the slough would freeze over hard enough for us to put on our skates and slide around. In the summer, when I was a teenager, we would build rafts out of short lengths of old telephone poles. Nelson would get out his harmonica and play while sitting in a lawn chair on the raft.
John and I played baseball catch a lot. John was a much better baseball player than I was when we were very young and his father would play ball with him to improve his game. I used to get upset that Fairy had very little time to practice and play catch with me. At the time, I did not really understand that Fairy had two jobs, the dairy farm and the sawmill whereas John’s father only had the dairy farm. It seemed unfair to me at the time but I later realized Fairy and Margot’s hard work meant that we could have indoor toilets, television, and cars none of which the White family had at that time. My parents labour really paid off for our family. Most families had cars by this time, but Mr. White had been injured in an accident while working at a sawmill and could not work there anymore so they only had income from their small farm and the cost of owning and running a car was out of the question for them.
We did not go to kindergarten in those days, so grade one was our first experience with school. Edith McDermot was our grade one teacher. John was good at baseball but not so good at reading. It was the opposite for me. I caught on to reading very fast and at the end of grade one I won a prize for being the top student whereas John had to repeat the grade; however, when he was 10 years old he made the Little League baseball team and I did not. (I was not very good at sports until I was a teenager.) When I was 10, I skipped a grade so I was now two grades ahead of John and sadly our close friendship ended because we had friends from our own school classrooms.
While we did not have ipads, computers, electronic games, or even much to watch on the two television channels, we did have lots of activities to keep us busy. We played board games and cards indoors and had lots of exercise outside. Each year in the early summer, I would run back and forth on the gravel roadway from the house to the barn to toughen up my feet so that I could go barefoot most of the summer. I loved to run across the fields, being careful not to step in cow manure ‘pies’ that dotted all the pastures. Stepping in a cow pie meant that you could slip and fall, and with bare feet you got all that smelly manure squishing up between your toes.
Nelson and I had fun with the many, many toys given to us by our generous parents. Each Christmas our tree would be loaded to overflowing with presents for us. Margot and Fairy really went all out, probably because they had so little when they were children. Our Christmas tradition involved having our grandmother (Margot’s mother) and step-grandfather drive out to the farm from their home in Vancouver. We could not open presents until they arrived around 10:30 in the morning. It was torture to see the tree piled high with wrapped gifts but the wait was worth it with presents to keep us busy for months to come. One vivid memory that Nelson and I share is waking up on Christmas morning to find shiny red scooters beside all the other gifts under the tree. The scooters proved to be lots of fun as we rode back and forth on our concrete sidewalk and made jumps out of old boards.
When I was young, the most popular movies and television shows were about the days of the Wild West when cowboys wore guns in hip holsters and there were many stories about gunslingers and gun fights. (When I was 4 years old I won a colouring contest with a prize for the whole family to see one of these ‘western’ movies in a town close to ours.) Margot and Fairy gave us toys which allowed us to pretend we were bad guys or good guys in the olden days. Our guns and holsters were really fancy and probably cost our parents a lot. We were lucky children. We actually had a connection to the Wild West through our step-grandfather whose father had three notches filed into a pistol he owned showing that he had shot three men in gunfights.
Trains
Not having a car meant that John’s mother would get groceries by walking to the nearest town, Pitt Meadows, which had only two grocery stores: Davie Jones Confectionary and Struthers General Store. In those days, there were no supermarkets like Save On Foods or Country Grocer so people shopped locally at the two small grocery businesses. The quickest way to get to these two stores was by walking the railway tracks which ran along the back of our farm. It would take about half an hour to make it to town. We really were not supposed to walk on the tracks because of the danger from trains but in those days, many people would walk along the rail lines rather than the roadways simply because the straight railroad lines meant shorter distances. Often because John was going with his mother, I would go along too. It was an adventure. The problem was, of course, that sharing these tracks with trains could cause problems for the walkers.
These were not like the trains you see today. They were called steam engine trains because they used steam from heated water to drive the motors. They burned coal to heat the water and the coal fire meant that there was a long plume of thick black, smelly smoke which poured from the engine’s smokestack, coiling above the train and then drifting down into the fields below, leaving a dirty reminder of the train for many minutes after the train had rushed past. When John’s mother would hear a train coming, she would pull us off to the side of the tracks and hold us out of harm’s way. I always imagined these trains to be mechanical dragons breathing fire and steam and bearing down on us like they were going to gobble us up. When they passed us, the roar was deafening, and we would cough from the smoke.
Sometimes a repair crew would come by on their work car (called a hand car) which rode on the rail tracks. There would be two workers using levers like a teeter totter which they would pump up and down to propel the car along. Usually, they would just wave at us as they went by but one time they stopped and gave us a ride into town. That was great fun. By the time I was about 6 years old, the steam engines were replaced by diesel engines which were much faster, quieter, and cleaner… no more smoke lingering in our fields.
At this time, passenger trains were a very popular way to travel in Canada. Very few people could afford to travel in airplanes in those days and there were not very many passenger flights like today. Just after I would go to bed, a passenger train would go by on the tracks along the back of the farm and in the winter when it was dark I could see through my bedroom window the lights in the passenger cars as they rolled by. I would let my mind drift and imagine travelling in one of those magical cars, having adventures and seeing the world. By the time I grew up, however, most people were travelling the world by airplane, although there are still a few special trains that take people across Canada and now there are commuter trains which carry people to and from areas like Pitt Meadows to their work in the city.
In those early days when I was quite a small boy, there were homeless people called hobos or tramps who would travel from place to place by climbing into empty rail cars to get a free ride. This was illegal and extremely dangerous when tramps jumped on or off a moving box car. These hobos did it anyway as they had no money for other transportation. Because of the rail lines that bordered the edge of our farm, tramps would sometimes jump off the train and come up to our house to ask Margot for food. This made her very nervous and a few times Fairy would find these tramps sheltering in our barn. Margot would often feed them and Fairy would give them a small amount of money for food and they would be on their way. No harm ever came as a result of the hobos, even though Margot was worried about them, and it seemed to John and me that this was an exciting life.
For fun we would tie a pouch of cloth on the end of a pole and have our mothers fill this with a picnic lunch. We would then ‘tramp’ off to a spot by the slough to eat our lunch and pretend that we were on a grand adventure.
A Bigger House
If you look back at the photos of the barn and the house, you can see that they look very old and in need of repair. You also know now that Margot and Fairy did not have much money when they started out. They worked diligently and built up the dairy herd so they could make money to buy a farm tractor, get electricity, television, milking machines, and drinking water for the house. As well, they now had two young boys to raise. They still could not afford many things but they were no longer really poor. The two-bedroom house was now too small since Uncle Ken was still there and often Teddy, too, on the weekends. Additionally, Margot and Fairy often would have other friends and relatives stay over during the summer, helping out on the farm and learning about living in the country. With Margot’s large vegetable garden, an orchard of fruit trees, all the milk and eggs as well as pork, beef, and chicken there was always plenty to eat but not enough space for guests sleeping in the house. They needed a new barn, too, but first more bedrooms were necessary with the arrival of baby Nelson.
To expand the house, Fairy and Margot decided to dig a basement. Over the basement, which extended out the back of the house, Fairy would build two more bedrooms and later a bedroom in the basement under the house. He used jacks to raise the house a little so it could sit on blocks and then had the horses pull a scraper that dug out the dirt to make a large hole under the house. He then mixed concrete and slid it into a wood framework to form the walls of the new basement, and he poured concrete to make the floor. This was a difficult job. It is much easier to construct a basement first and then build a new house over it but Fairy and Margot did not have enough money for a new house. This would have to do.
Two new bedrooms were built and were connected by a secret closet passageway. You could go into the bedroom closet with all the clothes hanging down and then push through the clothes to emerge in the other bedroom. This was great fun for Nelson and me because if we had friends or cousins over, we could go into one bedroom, quickly go through the secret closet and emerge in the other room. The other children would be puzzled as to how we would be able to disappear and then reappear behind them. The new basement was fine until winter set in, with its very rainy weather. The level of the slough beside the house would rise so that it was higher than the walls of the basement. You can guess what might happen. Water started to pour into the new basement. For a couple of winters the basement was always flooded and the water was deep enough for me to play with toy boats and splash around in my gumboots. Fun for me, but this was not what had been planned for the basement. Fairy came up with a solution. He broke apart the concrete floor in one corner and installed a sump pump. This pump would pull the water from below the basement floor just before the water level was high enough to cause a problem. An automatic switch would start the pump running. The basement stayed dry from then on.
A few years later, my bedroom was built with this sump pump under a cupboard in the corner of my room. This pump made a very loud noise, first, a sucking sound that I imagined was a monster pulling itself out of the mud and then a rough roar as if the monster was angry that it was trapped under the cupboard. I was not really afraid as I knew what the sound was, but my imagination painted some very interesting pictures of the sump pump monster. If any guests slept over in our house we had to warn them about the ‘monster’ in the basement. The outside of the house needed lots of work, too. If you look at the pictures, you will see weathered wood and small windows that were not very attractive. One of my school friends was visiting one day and he told me that our house looked like a barn. No one that I knew lived in a house that looked as poor as ours. I used to dream of having a new house that I could be proud of and one that friends would not teach me about; however, fixing the outside of the house was not a priority for Fairy and Margot as they had to do something about the old barn first.
A New Barn
The old barn was simply not large enough to increase the size of the dairy herd so that Fairy and Margot could make enough money to buy necessary farm equipment and to fix up their house more. The old barn had another problem other than being too small. The roof leaked and when it snowed there was a dangerous possibility that it might collapse. Winters were colder when I was a small boy. This meant a lot of work to shovel snow from the roof of the barn to prevent a catastrophe. Fairy had plans drawn up for a larger and much more modern barn. This one would have a round metal roof so the snow would slide off on its own. The inside of the barn would accommodate more milk cows and the haymow would not be above the milking parlour making it easier to drop bales down to feed the cows rather than having to drag them from the back of the barn. (By this time, we no longer had loose hay but had hay baled to make it easier to handle and better to store over winter.)
Fairy and Margot did not have enough money to build such a modern barn but, before building one, Fairy made a good business decision. Just before the school year opened in 1957, there was a far in the refurbished and about to be reopened Number One Schoolhouse that had been closed for a few years but was an original elementary school in Pitt Meadows. Fairy saw that really only the roof had been badly damaged and he put in a lowball bid of $200 to salvage and demolish the school, seeing an opportunity for building materials for the new barn. This proved to be an excellent move as he won the contract with the salvage operation providing many of the building supplies for the new barn (plus an oil furnace for our house).
Construction started in the spring of 1958. The back of the old barn with the haymow and horse stalls were torn down first, leaving the milking parlour in the front. (Cows still needed to be milked but this was now spring so they did not need to be fed hay so the haymow could go temporarily). It was a very exciting time when the barn was being built. Many neighbours came to help out and one neighbour, Jack Cleave, was a master carpenter so he took over as boss for the construction. In those days, farming families helped each other without being paid. Constructing a new barn was a very special event called a ‘barn raising’ and other farmers would help because they knew that someday they might need help in building their own barn.
Margot was as busy as the barn workers because she had to prepare lunch and sometimes dinner feasts for these hungry helpers. It was a matter of pride for farm wives in times of haying or barn raising that the volunteer workers would be fed large and delicious meals. Margot went all out and the dining table would be filled to overflowing with an assortment of main course and dessert dishes. On one weekend of barn raising, she baked 8 pies!
I loved these meals as the men would tell stories about times when they had been logging and farming, often highlighting the adventures with their horse teams. One uncle was particularly good at these tales, recalling times when his small but powerful Morgan horse could outperform even those big Clydesdales. He would be others that the horse could pull a big log that no one else though possible and he would always win… or so he told us.
The new barn was built over the summer. It had lots of windows salvaged from the school and many modern features besides the round metal roof. The new barn had a haymow that was on the floor above the milking parlour. The floor was constructed of cedar flooring from the school. The bales of hay for the cows could now be tossed down through a hole in the haymow floor.
One day, Nelson was too close to the hole and lost his balance. Suddenly he fell about 3 meters and might have been killed had there not been a bale of hay on the concrete floor below. He crashed onto the bale and was stunned but seemed to be o.k. That night he had a very sore neck and throat and Margot and Fairy thought he was swollen from the landing on the bale. The next morning, however, it turned out that he had the mumps which is a childhood disease that causes such swelling. (Now kids are vaccinated against getting the mumps so it is very rare but when Nelson and I were children, it was a common disease. You would be sick for a week.)
I loved the metal barn roof because it made such a lovely thrumb, thrumb, thrumb sound in the haymow when it rained. Nelson and I had so much fun playing tag with our friends and cousins, climbing on the bales, and building forts. And Fairy never had to shovel snow off the barn roof again.
A Still Better House
The new barn was a terrific addition to our more prosperous farm but I still longed for a new house. Finally, when I was about 11, Fairy and Teddy did many improvements inside the house making a much larger living room and new dining area. Margot got a new laundry room with a new clothes washer and a dryer (prior to this she dried all the clothes on a clothesline outside or on a rack suspended over the sawdust-burning stove in the kitchen.) She even bought a dishwasher for the kitchen, an appliance that was rather rare in most homes at the time. A new coat of stucco greatly improved the look of the exterior and large windows provided spectacular views of the Coast Mountains. We even had a carport built to house our car and a chest freezer there to store our food. I felt pretty good because now that the new barn was finished, and our house was fixed up at last, no one would call our house a ‘barn’. To me, it seemed like forever that we had to endure such an impoverished-looking home, but Fairy and Margot had been patient, always making sure that they had enough funds for the next important project.
Visitors Coming
The road into the farm was a long straight stretch of gravel and nearly every weekend relatives and friends would ‘drop in’. We never knew who was coming but when the weather was dry we could see clouds of dust from the cars as they came down the road and we would try to figure out who our next visitors would be. When they arrived, Fairy would stop to chat for a few minutes and then would need to get back to the job he was doing on the farm. Margot would always visit and then would invite these unexpected but welcome visitors to stay for supper (which most would do). Afterwards, Fairy would be able to have longer conversations over a meal and later after milking the cows. It was nice now to have a house big enough to have these large dinners and I really enjoyed the conversations and discussions on wide-ranging topics which were an important part of any visit. Margot and Fairy loved to entertain and we had many big parties over the years. Margot always made sure that people were comfortable and had more than enough to eat. Both Fairy and Margot thought that helping others was one of the best things in life so our parents were very popular with family and their many friends. Fairy liked to tease people and have fun in a good-natured way. One of his favourite tricks was to give guests a ‘dribble’ water glass which had an almost invisible hole in the side and when someone unsuspecting drank from it, water would dribble onto them, much to Fairy’s delight. Fairy had an excellent sense of humour.
Our home was always filled with laughter. Our family dinners were a time to share stories and discuss current events. When guests were there, Nelson and I were always included in the conversations. The conversations were as wide-ranging as the people themselves. Friends included farmers, medical professionals, store owners, pharmacists, local politicians, tradespeople, mill workers… an eclectic mix, all welcomed by Fairy and Margot who relished this varied company. Often visitors included cousins who were about my age and my parents would ask me to look after them, showing them around the farm or playing in the haymow. Mostly this was fun but there were three trouble-making cousins who I hated to see visit. They would chase the cows or chickens, try to do very dangerous things like starting fires or smoking cigarettes in the barn and even attempt to start the tractor to take it for a joy ride. I had to stop them from causing such trouble. After they would leave I would plead with my parents not to make me supervise them again. Thankfully, these cousins were infrequent visitors. Years later when we were grown up, all three of these ‘bad’ cousins ended up in jail. Not surprising!
Food for the Cows and for the People
The whole purpose of farms is to produce food to sell and use for yourself. And you have to grow the crops to feed the animals. Farms need healthy pastures and hay fields. These do not come without care and attention by the farmers who require equipment to till the soil, fertilize the land, seed the crops, and harvest the grain and hay. Farmers also need tools to maintain their equipment, fix fences, build storage sheds, and do all the other necessary jobs to make a dairy farm work properly. Fairy and Margot started their farm with some horse-drawn equipment but as they began working with a tractor rather than Dobbin and Blackie they need equipment which would be pulled by the tractor. Some of the horse equipment could be adapted to be pulled by a tractor while some new ones would have to be purchased. Fairy was good friends with a machinist, Hans Hoffmann who had a machine shop near the end of Advent Road. Hans was a very shy man but he liked Fairy and helped by fixing some equipment to be able to be used with the tractor. Hans Hoffmann’s machine shop is now part of the Pitt Meadows Museum. Once more, Fairy and Margot had to save money to improve the tools so that their farm could be more productive. And as with other necessary farm needs, it was quite a few years before our parents had all the farm equipment they needed but from where they started out, they made amazing progress.
One of Fairy’s early purchases was an old dump truck which he converted for use in picking up baled hay in the fields. When I was 11 years old, Fairy had me driving this big truck to help with the haying. He put blocks on the brake and clutch pedals so I could reach them with my feet, and put the truck into a very low gear so it would only go extremely slow. I would steer the truck between the hay bales while Fairy and a crew of helpers would load the hay. I really felt important and I will be that none of you would even think that you could drive a large truck at the age of 11. This was almost as good as leading Dobbin to put the hay into the haymow. As the milk herd grew, there was enough grass for pasture, but not enough to grow hay for the winter. Fairy solved this problem by leasing 80 acres of property to grow the hay. This large field is now the home of a golf driving range in Pitt Meadows, and for me, it was the training ground to learn to drive the hay truck.
Fairy also rented pasture from two nearby farms: first, one owned by Doug and Vi McMyn and later another, owned by Kid and Dolly Howe. This pasture was needed for a growing herd of beef cows. With this rented property, the working farm was now over 100 acres. Fairy had confidence in me but I could not always live up to his expectations. When I was 12 years old, he asked me to drive our car home from the same spot that he had sent me home on top of Dobbin. I was a bit nervous but thought I could do it since my father was right behind me on our tractor. I was fine until I came to a small narrow bridge over a slough leading into our farm. As I approached in the car, it seemed to me in my imagination that the bridge was too narrow and I was afraid to keep driving. I panicked and slammed on the brakes sliding the car sideways on the gravel road, stopping just before heading over a bank into the slough. Fairy realized that I was just too young to be driving a car, and this time he did not need a scolding from Margot to let him know. I still got to drive the truck for haying, though.
People used to say that farmers never go hungry but most people do not realize the hard work that is involved. It took a great
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