Postcards from Paradise

Submitted by Blane Després, PhD

It’s quite a stretch to reach back to another era and recall bits and scraps of early life. I don’t mean the human species kind of “early life” with David Attenborough reading these short scripts, like postcards of people’s past. I mean uncovering and reconstructing memories long ago relegated to a cubby hole next to the “pretty much forgotten” box.

When I came upon this site because of a prompt from Anne-Marie (Balcom) Pearle, herself married to a distant relative of mine (Jack), I felt a slow-motion drift into what I could remember about growing up in a little village that became indelibly etched into my identity. A part of me is suddenly prodding from those memory synapses. They’re slow. Little exercise over the past few decades. I’m hoping the PHS’s efforts result in a tremendous archive of sorts of not simply memories and stories –vital of course to a project such as this– but of the lives and hearts of living souls who breathed in the air of the Annapolis Valley in Paradise.

What first caught my attention on the Society’s website about this endeavour was the write up and pictures of the Paradise School. I started my education there. It was also the impetus for my scratches at poetry that earned a publication –my first– in The Antigonish Review appropriately titled, Paradise School:

the smell
I remember the smell
of dustbain & the musty
odour of decay (&
the teacher’s perfume)
& wet clothing
hanging to dry
along the wall
as we squirmed & shuffled
waiting to get outside
to grasp some more
fresh air.
(Number 37, Spring 1979, p. 64)

I cried my first day of school. My mother, Helen (nee Jackson), tried to drop me off there in September 1960. I was sure she was trading me in for something less stressful in her life, like Maxwell House Instant coffee or a package of Export-A. Perhaps both, in my case. Or to pay off a debt. I lost and had to do time starting out in grade Primary, moving away from Paradise three times over the next six years for parole, I think. I probably cried the whole first week, but I can only remember that first day. Now it’s called Early Childhood Trauma. Back then it was Early Childhood Drama. Making new friends helped. Seems to me there were actually two rows of students in Primary. In a two-room schoolhouse, that’s huge! Then again, there were likely only 10 of us. What helped to make things interesting was that there were four grade levels on the first floor of the school. Upstairs had the big kids in grades 4 through 6. I believe some of those kids drove themselves to school, but I could be mistaken.

 And that hand pump. There were two rituals everyday: cursive writing and reading and math and drawing/colouring pictures of seasonal items (pumpkins, autumn leaves, Christmas Trees, Audley Thompson’s Texaco garage with old cars as lawn ornaments) and lining up to get your personal mug that hung on a rung on the wall near that hand pump for a drink of water. That and the cod-liver oil pills we had to take. Kids hated those pills. I secretly liked them and especially how they smelled. Or I’m confusing that with the general odour of a room filled with children who rarely bathed (once a week or bi-weekly in some cases). I wanted more (pills…not smells, hence the poem), but they were rationed. It wasn’t that long after WWII, you know.

Once in a while, someone would drop their mug on the wooden floor to see it smash. Heartbreaking. After that, if your mug got broken, you had to cup your hands together for a drink. Honest! Well, at least Reggie Pearle, my cousin, did. That looked cool, so my mug broke the next day and the two of us drank triumphantly from our hands for one day. The note home did not amuse or impress my mother. Thankfully, my father was away at sea (another story). We only had two mugs in the house. She had to get an extra one from my grandparents who lived in Bridgetown so I could “Please replace the broken mug for your son who broke his today.”

The hand pump was also the oasis for the upstairs grades. Two students were chosen to come downstairs with a gigantic water container. I was in awe that those kids could lift such a mammoth object when it was empty let alone filled with water to transport it back up the stairs so those grades could also drink. Looking back now, it was probably the size of a coffee urn. But it seemed like such an amazing job to me. I would have to wait four more years before I could even apply to get selected for that task. I could hardly wait. Fortunately, there were pretty girls downstairs (upstairs, too, to be fair, but far too old to be of interest) that helped to wash that job prospect from my wish list. That hand pump, though, was pretty impressive as was the collection of mugs on the wall like trophies.

We had a variety of teachers as we progressed through the first-floor grade levels: Mrs. Rafuse followed by Mrs. Ritcey followed by Mrs. Kerr, all wonderful human beings. All work and no play. Always helpful and encouraging. How they juggled four grades of young children still boggles my mind. Perhaps that helps to explain why we had three teachers over those four years? Or else they found a way to get to Cherry Street with Dick and Jane and friends. I bet they had a nice school.

From 1959-1974