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Skip this - it's only a Preface
Is
there any defence for a book like this, offering you mainly reruns?
If you haven't read any of it yet and you
don't know who I am, this is possibly a pointless question. People who have read all this stuff before, however, (or most
of it) might well ask.
Some at least of those people are partly to blame for encouraging me. Well, it did become
rather noticeable, I must admit, that I was someone who made a bit of a thing about writing to the Hudson Gazette, so I suppose
that talking to me you would be likely to mention it. I shouldn't have taken it as indicating a serious interest.
But
people who write things are like actors, preternaturally interested in any reaction whatever, and over-responsive to any mild
pat or slap, like puppies. So it came about that over the years I deluded myself with the impression that all of these nice
people liked my stuff enough to stand reading it again, even at the cost of cash that might be better spent on some nourishing
potato chips and a beer or two.
However, if you are not one of those people whose small talk has thus beguiled
me, you of course are still entitled to ask why you are expected to read any of this.
I really don't have much
of an answer in that case. A lot of the situations here are old hat, and probably of interest only to those who have lived
in Hudson a decade or so and who might entertain nostalgic feelings for the recent past. A lot of the opinions expressed are
cantankerous, the implications are of the I-told-you-so variety, much of the humour is weakly facetious, the verses pure doggerel.
I have to confess, the main reason for this book is vanity. I like reading my old stuff. "Boy," I say to myself (incongruously)
"I was good then." This would imply that I don't feel as good now - I am getting on - and thus a way of remedying such a state
of mind would be to go over the old ground and tidy it up a bit, omitting some stuff (Oh yes, I have done, though you might
think I could have worked harder at it), and slapping down some continuity between the bits. Vanity publishing, yes. Gave
me something to do. Passes the goddam time.
When I say "tidy it up a bit" I mean I have really altered nothing in
the sense of anything I wrote. There's an occasional change in punctuation and of the odd word - only in order to clean up
the meaning, but not to alter it. Besides, the Hudson Gazette was by no means infallible when translating original manuscripts
into print, especially hand-written ones, I think I am well covered there.
If people in Hudson who are
mentioned here get upset in any way, I really am sorry. I am fond of them all, most of the time, but if I am to represent
the kind of place Hudson seems to me to be, it's unavoidable that I talk about individuals. There are many, many of them around,
often left over like me from dim decades going back to the 19th century. The subject of this little book is my Hudson,
not anyone else's, and it isn't even all of that. It's that part of Hudson that has provoked me into writing. There's an awful
lot else. It's a good place, or has been up till the time of writing.
Of course, it's all constantly going to hell
in a handcart, but miraculously enough when you look again it's still there. Council or no Council.
Some nice people
Nearly
all the letters and verses in this booklet appeared first in the Hudson Gazette - or the Lake of Two Mountains Gazette, its
earlier manifestation. I therefore owe to its cheerful and usually complaisant editors, Ron Jones and Greg Jones, my sincere
thanks for allowing them to appear there, letting me use some of their facilities for getting certain copies made, and generally
being welcoming.
The delightful cover is by Jill Evans, based on a photograph from the archives of the Hudson
Historical Society furnished for the purpose by Frank Nobbs, their genial archivist. Jill has done splendid posters for the
Hudson Players Club, which also display her acute sense of visual wit as well as her first rate eye for design. All done out
of friendship and for two free copies: my deepest gratitude.
I have to thank also Jill Baird, Ernie Frohloff,
and Howie Putnam, who have allowed me to use in these covers some of their entertaining letters and verses, that were in these
cases provoked by some of mine. There were many other letters in those years that I would love to use, but there's a limit
to my time and energies, and also perhaps to the tolerance of readers for resuscitated ephemera like these.
At
a very late moment I had qualms about my judgment and asked Karen Williamson to substitute hers in reviewing the proposed
contents here. An unattractive chore, coinciding at the time with the equally tiresome one of getting all the leaves raked
off her property and into those obscene, swollen, flaccid orange bags that have been decreed preferable to the sweet smokes
of our autumns. I am grateful as always to this tireless friend.
Finally, may I thank all those friends and neighbours
of Hudson, including do-gooders, dogs, Councillors, dépanneurs, developers, Mayors and so forth, who continue to provide so
generously to the attentive observer such an endless supply of comic material.
So We Came to
Hudson
The Harley family arrived in Hudson more or less by chance, in the summer of 1966, and as has happened
with many others we stayed on indefinitely - committed to the place.
It was the 10th house Pat and I had made a home
in, and we were certainly a bit tired of moving every second year on average, with our three sons and all our other junk.
But although we settled in to the big house on the Côte with some relief, thinking "never again", that relief did not account
for our subsequent addiction to Hudson. It was very soon, just a week or two after we had moved in, when Pat reported getting
friendly smiles as she walked down the road, from people she had never met.
We had simply had to move once more.
The house in Baie d'Urfé, next to my work at Macdonald College, was rapidly becoming too small, not because it was shrinking
but because the boys were expanding. A large hole that appeared in the wall of the passage had made this point for us: in
a friendly if over enthusiastic gesture Son 1 had pushed Son 2 (or maybe vice versa) right through. This had been the second
house we had actually owned.
So with myself unwilling but acquiescent, Pat had set about looking for a large enough
garden and house, and with the new bridge completed at Ile aux Tourtres, Hudson did not seem an unfeasible location. Swallowing
hard at the apparently enormous cost, we struck a deal with the Evanses. When we were sitting afterwards in the pleasant drawing
room, with the windows open on the early spring evening - we had first seen things in the quiet of February under snow - I
was disconcerted to notice the 6 o'clock traffic rushing noisily down into Hudson.
"Oh, you soon get used to that,"
said Mrs. Evans.
Well, we never really did. The noise has increased in volume ever since - along with the volume
of my letters to the Editor.
Though the "boys" (who are now aged 30 to 37) have long left the area, as Hudson
youth mostly do, we are still both here. Myself in a small house on Brisbane, and Pat in the churchyard of St. James. She
died on Christmas Eve in 1987. It was tragic that she could not live out the years she had looked for, in this place to which
she had contributed so much in gaiety and music. There were an amazing number and variety of people at her memorial service.
Chronological
Index
1972 " 'Yeoman' Rated Wonderful Show” review
1973 People on bikes letter
1974 Road
salt and development letter
Hudson's perhaps future letter
The Artistic Director [unpublished] verse
"A
Spirited Coward" review
1975 Nights with lights, and a lonely firefly letter
Let there be
light [Gwen Rattray] letter
1976 "Just another Execution" notice
The 'rural' Côte letter
1977 "The Countess of Cavagnal" notice
Election slates letter
1978 My own invention letter
1979 The
Gentlefolk of Como verse
Song for Hudson Heights [unpublished] verse
1980 The town centre:
3 to 2 against letter
'Local Age' letter
Self-policing for cars letter
1981 Also
about salt letter
1982 "The Story of the Como Dragon" notice
1983 "Mini Mikado Claims Son, Brings
down
House" review
1984 Ochone for Hudson Hardware! letter
1985 'Rural slum' letter
'Rural
slum' explained letter
1986 The big loud dogs of Hudson verse
John! [Jill Baird] verse
To
Jill I kneel verse
After Wordsworth verse
That walkway by the Viviry verse
Address
to the Deaf verse
"Rana's Glittering Pond" [unpublished] review
Reply from Ernst C. Frohloff letter
Reply from H. L. Putnam letter
Reply to the replies letter
Reply to the reply
to the replies
[Putnam & Frohloff] verse
Reply to the reply to the reply
to the
replies [unpublished] verse
Rethinking Christmas [part unpublished] [letter]
1987 People
on foot letter
Never on Sundays letter
Cahots verse
Grass in your Driveway:
a Snob Song verse
Wordsworth in Hudson verse
1988 A nature note from Higher Hudson
(or, An
Elephant on Brisbane) verse
Election Address (or Hudson Spa) verse
Signs
everywhere letter
Chemically sprayed people letter
'On showing slides of past productions
in the
Hudson Players Club's 40th year' verse
What to do about a noisy party letter
Journey's
End verse
A Ballad (on Mullan's) verse
1989 O Alstonvale! (Marching Song of the
Alstonvale Projectors) verse
Responding to Gibb Stewart letter
PAH, RAH, & TCHAH! letter
Development
as addiction letter
The town meeting letter
Vote! [unpublished] verse
On
acrimony letter
Song for the Saints of Alstonvale
[unpublished] verse
no date Chris
Miss Karl [unpublished] verse
Song for the Widows of Knowlton
[unpublished] verse
Alphabetical
Index
Verses
A Ballad (on Mullan's)
Address to the Deaf
After Wordsworth
A nature note
from Higher Hudson
(or, an elephant on Brisbane)
Cahots
Chris Miss Karl
Election Address (or,
Hudson Spa)
Grass in Your Driveway: a Snob Song
John! [Jill Baird]
Journey's End
Reply to
the reply to the replies
[Putnam & Frohloff]
Reply to the reply to the reply to the replies
Song
for Hudson Heights
Song for the Saints of Alstonvale
Song for the Widows of Knowlton
That walkway
by the Viviry
The Artistic Director
The big loud dogs of Hudson
The Gentlefolk of Como
To
Jill I kneel
Vote!
Wordsworth in Hudson
Letters
Also about salt
Chemically
sprayed people
Development as addiction
Election slates
Hudson's perhaps future
Let there
be light [Gwen Rattray]
'Local Age'
My own invention
Never on Sundays
Nights with lights, and a
lonely firefly
Ochone for Hudson Hardware!
On acrimony
PAH, RAH, & TCHAH!
People on bikes
People on foot
Reply from Ernst C. Frohloff
Reply form H. L. Putnam
Reply to the replies
Responding to Gibb Stewart
Rethinking Christmas
Road salt and development
'Rural slum'
'Rural
slum' explained
Signs everywhere
'Suburban slum'
The 'rural' Côte
The town centre: 3 to 2
against
What to do about a noisy party
Reviews & Notices
"A Spirited Coward"
"Just another
Execution"
"Mini Mikado Claims Son, Brings Down House"
"Rana's Glittering Pond"
"The Countess of Cavagnal"
"The
Story of the Como Dragon"
" 'Yeoman' Rated Wonderful Show "
Even
Letters:
Some Letters that got Reactions
In 1984, eighteen years after our arrival, I
had retired, we separated, and the house on the Côte was sold, while I tried life in Scotland. And on my perhaps by then predictable
return from there in October of 1985, and having waited till after the municipal election, I drew the attention of fellow
residents in my by then predictable manner with a letter to the Editor.
During those years I had become a desultory
contributor to the Lake of Two Mountains (later Hudson) Gazette. Not altogether surprisingly, my retirement was about to increase
both the frequency of those letters, somewhat markedly, and the strain on the patience of those who read that paper. But the
very last two words in this letter did seem to take a lot of people by surprise.
[30th October, 1985]
Dear Sir,
Returning to Hudson in October after a year's absence has been a genuine pleasure,
except for one regrettably familiar thing. You could think that, in our fall, to stroll through the town in fine weather would
be one of the most agreeable things in the world. It is far from it, the conditions underfoot being so disagreeable.
For
those who move about Hudson upholstered and on wheels, things are fine and convenient. But each day, for those who go on foot
- young mothers with infants and dogs on leash, elderly parties taking the air, and visitors perambulating but stumbling from
shop to shop, conditions can only be described as primitive, squalid, and downright dangerous.
It makes you wonder
when was the last time any councillors, or mayor, personally walked the length of the village from St Thomas School to St
James Church, returning along the other side of the road - and pushing a pram all the way to see for themselves. For that
matter I wonder how many of our virtuous candidates have done it. We are all agreed that Hudson is no suburb. But in the transition
of its centre from rural peace to commercial prosperity, there has got to be a better solution than this rural slum.
Yours
etc. John Harley
There was a sharp reaction among a number of people, and a couple of letters appeared
in the paper, one of them suggesting - as some Canadians tend to do - that I go back where I came from if I didn't like Hudson.
So I responded a couple of weeks later in conciliatory but explanatory vein:
[13th
November, 1985]
Dear Sir,
As Mr. Houghton can hardly be alone in his response to my letter about the state of the
walkways in Hudson, I should like to apologise to him and to any others whose feelings I have hurt with my rough words. I
am as fond of the place as he is.
Should he look at my letter again - though I can understand that he might not particularly
want to - he would see that when I wrote of a "rural slum" I was talking not of Hudson but of its town centre; and that the
words "primitive, squalid, and downright dangerous" referred only to the conditions underfoot there. The dirt, unevenness,
and exposure of our walkways may seem no big deal to able-bodied natives on their own, but I was protesting on behalf of those
who were really troubled by these conditions, the young mothers with children, the elderly, and the visitors who shop here.
They too, perhaps, might be invited to move to some more congenial place elsewhere, as Mr. Houghton suggests I do (though
I admit it never occurred to me to call Scotland "exotic") but it hardly seems fair.
We are talking about change in
the town. Mr. Houghton mentions the many improvements in 40 years in or along Main Road, but I'm sure he will agree that there
are some things that have got worse, including the traffic. New England and Ontario (and those are hardly exotic locations)
have many towns like Hudson where families may walk with far less anxiety and discomfort than among our potholes and puddles.
Indeed, you only have to go to our neighbours in Quebec, to St. Lazare, Vaudreuil, and Rigaud, to find far more comfortable
conditions for a walk downtown.
Our downtown is still crummy, despite a few improvements. It looks bad. It conveys
an image of poor administration quite out of line with what Hudson has in fact enjoyed in other respects - no question - in
recent years. I am confident, if only they would tackle the problem, that the new council and our by now almost hereditary
mayor will find a solution that uniquely suits the nature of this town. (And I didn't mean to suggest by this last phrase
that we should all go to sleep on it.) Yours etc.
I thought I'd start with these two letters
for several reasons. For one thing, they illustrate that however carefully one may write, one will not be as carefully read.
People glance through a newspaper in a highly sophisticated but often hasty manner, reacting only to parts of it, to pick
up perhaps a line or two, perhaps an entire article, but very rarely to read anything a second time.
To cope with
this I have generally tried to promise the odd joke, irony, or provocation, that might be missed if the letters were not followed
with some attention. I also took some pains with fluency and with the salience of main points, knowing how very easy it is
for readers to get sidetracked by any ambiguity, want of clarity, or strangeness in language whatever.
If there are
any consistencies of theme in this collection, moreover, these letters express one of them, the amenity of Hudson. I usually
hoped that I might get something done. The "something done" was often very modest, as in this case - having the Mayor and
councillors become aware, or if already aware encouraged to proceed - concerning an issue within their sphere of action.
A
great deal of what I wrote over the years might easily be dismissed as mere nagging. But on this issue of sidewalks I can
at least claim to have been onside, even if the Mayor and new Council had already discussed it, for in 1988 they did carry
out a very handsome job of restoring the appearance of our downtown, complete with sidewalks, and it is now quite a pleasure
to walk about there. Three years isn't bad for getting something done - if indeed what I wrote contributed at all.
But
to continue where I left off on this issue. Some time in the following summer the Mayor bragged a bit about the town's initiative
in developing a sort of country walk along the Viviry Creek (which however was going forward very sluggishly and is still
very little used). So I thought I'd snipe a little.
[30th July 1986]
Dear
Sir,
That walkway by the Viviry
May earn the Mayor glory;
What of the
walk along Main Road?
That's quite another story.
Almost exactly a year after that first
letter on the subject, I returned to the charge; and the following admittedly provocative letter prompted a stimulating exchange
of correspondence over 3 or 4 weeks with Councillor Ernst Frohloff, former Councillor Howard Putnam and others, that many
readers of the Gazette enjoyed. It seems to be worth reprinting most of it here.
[15th
November 1986]
Dear Sir,
About this time last year I wrote a letter to you in which I referred to parts
of downtown Hudson as a rural slum. I wish now to withdraw that accusation, which I believe may have given offence to some
fellow citizens; I was quite wrong. What I should have said was suburban slum.
Hudson has become predominantly suburban
in the last few years, as anyone can see with half an eye. Drive down the Côte and you see that the lane to Stirling Simon's
farm has been gouged into a bald street to nowhere for three-lane traffic; the walkway along the Viviry, which has had no-one
along it since its banks were bull-dozed two years ago, is equipped with an elaborately artificial mini-landscape as formal
entrance; the once beguiling, park-like driveway leading to Whitlock, is battlemented like the gateway to some fancy cemetery;
and now the grassy foreground of the school - as the Players Club audience discovered without warning in the darkness last
Friday night - is to become a vast asphalted area no doubt lined with wilting exotic shrubs, in the prescribed pattern of
North American suburbia. No need to fell the trees; they’ll just die in due course as usual, from stifled roots.
These
are only symptoms of the widespread general change. Hardly a house has been built in this period that isn't in some alien
style, clad in inappropriate materials, landscaped with instant grass like an architect assistant's office drawing, and cluttered
with carriage lamps and other country cuteries. It says little for the influence of all our enthusiastic real-estate ladies
and gentlemen, whose taste in these matters I am sure is at a different level, that these things go on endlessly being built
and sold, usually too large for their lot. I don't suppose there's much anyone can do about it.
What worries me a
bit though is that there are signs that the town (i.e. not you and me but the Council) is planning to do something about Main
Road in the Town Centre. I should be pleased, I suppose; and indeed I am. It may mean that we shall all be able to stroll
about in comfort meeting people and dodging into all the little shops that could do with the casual business, and generally
enjoying the town's considerable amenities. But I worry that almost certainly any such development will be carried out strictly
(and only) according to standards laid down by engineers and all the other people who make their money widening roads and
laying asphalt and landscaping the life out of the scenery and building cute little walls of coloured stones.
This
is how suburbia is made. You don't come to terms with whatever's there or growing there already; you just delete the lot and
impose your simple-minded will on the place, more or less because you happen to have acquired the tools to do it all with.
I'm
not sure I'm looking forward to this. Yours etc.
[from Ernst C. Frohloff] [26th November
1986]
Dear Sir,
Having read John Harley's preposterous letter in your column,
I can only surmise that my old acquaintance is once again displaying his sardonic wit, or else has reached his dotage. I hope
it is the former, since such a diatribe surely cannot be taken seriously by any long-time resident of Hudson. To answer just
a few of his observations may I point out that the "bald street to nowhere for three-lane traffic" which was Stirling Simon's
driveway in fact leads to a new development which will contain upward of 50 homes, and I very much doubt that any of the prospective
home-owners would appreciate using the old goat track as their main exit to a main artery. The developer has, in fact done
a good job of providing a proper roadway, of standard width, drainage, etc. As for the walkway along the Viviry river, had
Mr. Harley attended the open meetings at which landscape artist Lambert De Wit described this project to provide a nature
trail in its pristine essence, he may have realized that the artificial bank of earth at the entrance was placed there to
enhance the privacy of the walkway by blocking the noise, pollution, and sight of vehicles from Côte St. Charles, thereby
creating a feeling of complete isolation from man-made disturbances.
As for the new gates at Whitlock, I somewhat
share Mr. Harley's sentiments, but since beauty is in the eye of the beholder(s), maybe these elaborate portals are a reflection
of the taste and status of the members, and so are quite appropriate. Again, referring to the new parking lot at the school,
this is to serve also as a staging area for school buses. Surely this is better than having children board buses on Côte St.
Charles road in order to preserve a bit of grass.
Nowhere in this diatribe is there a single suggestion as to what
this scholarly gentleman would do to rectify the above onslaughts of modern civilization, nor advice as to what are suitable
home designs, materials, or ground cover to suit his aesthetic tastes, and his reference to most homes being built on lots
too small for their size demonstrated how ludicrous are his arguments, since Hudson has a By-law banning new houses on lots
of less than 20,000 square feet, which is considerably more than required in any other community hereabouts.
As Councillor
of the Town of Hudson, I shall not dignify his comments about Council's plans to improve the centre of town by refuting them
verbatim. Suffice to say that I seem to recall a letter from this same gentleman about a year ago [above] berating the town
officials for not providing proper sidewalks, and for having the streets in a condition deemed dangerous for pedestrians.
Now he worries that some competent engineers may advise the town how to proceed with a master plan to preserve the rural flavour
of the town. No doubt he would hire a Philosophy major to design the infrastructure to preserve our heritage. I can assure
Mr. Harley in complete honesty that the preservation of the rustic and rural character of Hudson has been a top priority of
our Mayor ever since he became a Town Official, and the present Council is devoted to maintain that mandate. We all would
like to see Hudson stay "as it is". But if Mr. Harley has a magic formula short of replicating the Berlin Wall complete with
guard posts and gates at the Cameron, Cote and Main Road to keep out the infidels, we on the Council would be delighted to
hear it.
C'mon, John, surely with some of the really contentious issues at which to tilt your ink-stained lance such
as the language debates splitting our society, or the circus which professes to be a Government in Ottawa [Who remembers which
one this was?], which should be a ready target for your acerbic pen, the town to which you chose to return cannot really be
all that bad. You being a man of letters, I would welcome any suggestions of a constructive nature you may harbour, so we
can discuss some of these issues over a toddy or two.
Ernst C. Frohloff
[from H.L.Putnam] [same
date]
The Editor,
It certainly was high time for that old manure disturber
John Harley to stir the pot again. Hudson is becoming so suburbanized and growing so fast it's almost mind boggling.
But
John forgets that he's part of the problem.
Before he arrived on the scene Cote St. Charles was a quiet, sandy dirt
road. There were only three school buses (Como, upper Cote St. Charles and the West End). Drivers from three stores - Mullan's,
Cousineau's and Habib's - called every morning to take your food order and deliver it the same afternoon. Local bakers delivered
fresh bread and other goodies to the door every day. Baseball was played on a farmer's field beside the Main Road just east
of the Viviry Creek and the police station. All the water mains were wooden (they used to leak quite regularly) and septic
tanks as we know them were a rarity.
Total winter-time population (pre-war) was probably around a thousand but this
mushroomed by several hundred each summer with the influx of noisy Montrealers to their "country" homes.
We think
John would have liked Hudson much better in those days. But he and a few thousand others didn't make it until many years later.
We're glad they did. Most have contributed toward making Hudson a rather pleasant, friendly vibrant place in which to live.
In
fact it has become so popular that real estate prices are at an all time high. So my tip to Mr. Harley is simply this: sell
out now John. You can probably triple your investment, and you can buy some unsullied land real cheap halfway between Rigaud
and Pointe Fortune.
Sincerely,
H.L.Putnam
Well,
I had been challenged. So I came back a week later -
[28th November
1986]
Dear Sir,
It's really something to have provoked such spirited responses as you printed last week from Ernie
Frohloff and Howie Putnam, both gentlemen being on top of their form. I feel rather proud. Of course both are or have been
Councillors, and who ever heard of perfect Councillors? Try as they will, they're not going to get everything right, any more
than I do.
Clearly I have been talking out of turn; my trouble seems to be that I have been an academic by profession,
and am a newcomer in Hudson - no parents in the graveyard - and I complain a lot (being in my dotage). The theme of my letter,
that Hudson has become largely suburban, is nevertheless accepted by these severe critics. Ernie gives a number of explanations
for some cases I mentioned, none of which are unexpected, but of course explanations are not excuses. For example, it is hardly
necessary to scar the countryside to allow some 50 householders access to a main road when an adequate lane already exists.
(And Stirling Simon has called, and been called, many things, but I doubt he'll appreciate "goat".)
After giving us
a really interesting glimpse of the way things used to be, Howie says we are all part of the problem. (Well, he rather assumes
we'll excuse those who like himself were here pre-war.) His remedy therefore seems to be that those who don't like anything
should leave. Those who don't care too much may stay. It's always been a seductive solution to coping with an opposition.
In
a part of my letter that did not get telescoped by the printer [since corrected in the version above] I did say that I didn't
suppose there was much anyone could do about all the suburbanization. My main point was my worry about how any change of Main
Road was going to turn out under the prevailing habit of letting "competent engineers" decide things for us, with their "proper
roadways, standard widths, and drainage etc." Their ideas of scenery are not ours. And if the Council's top priority for years
has been the preservation of Hudson's rural flavour, where then has all the suburbia come from?
Admittedly that may
be a nasty crack, for it ignores a good deal that the Council has indeed done, often in unobtrusive ways. But in the circumstances
I think mine is a legitimate worry, and one shared by a lot of people who by no means all are newcomers.
I'm no great
hand at construction (nor for that matter a "Philosopher"), but to Ernie's challenge to be constructive let me offer one or
two suggestions:
• ensure that any walls and so on to be built are made of local stone and materials, so far as
these are available;
• restore native trees to the sides of Main Road, wherever it has lost them or will lose them
- get ahead of the game by planting two for one, to allow for damage. Is it perhaps feasible to work out some kind of tax
incentive for businesses with frontage - so much per tree of given dimensions per given unit of length - either bribing or
penalising them?
• widen no road, and don't decide about it, until the less comfortable alternatives
- one-way system, or difficult traffic - have been understood and thrashed out in public;
• look after the interests
of humbler people first: school children, mothers with prams, weaker and elderly persons (lest in their dotage they complain),
small shopkeepers. Let the car drivers and truck drivers and the big shots look after themselves (but don't let them park
on the sidewalks);
• educate the builders. Legislation can't do it , but people who need planning permission should
not get it without a strong and if necessary prolonged demonstration that people hereabouts care for appearances. It's not
as if the town didn't have first-rate professionals living in it who could donate their advice if they knew it would be useful.
Other places manage.
Ernie and I are at least agreed on one point, where I thought Whitlock's new entrance suggested
a fancy cemetery. His wording, that this might be a reflection "of the taste and status of the members", strikes me as delicious.
They have lofted their approach, he seems to say, and now are lying dead. Hats off, gentlemen.
After a minute of silence
(believe me), I am
Yours etc.
Two weeks later, the fellows
caught me by surprise with the following effusion, displaying an unaccountable and disconcerting goodwill brought on no doubt
by well-being and Christian feeling, aided perhaps by the odd seasonable noggin:
Our last letter ... for 1986 [12th
December 1986]
'Tis the season to be jolly
And above all not be snarly
What would we do without Harley
Hudson
would be dull be golly
Though we carp at Harley's folly
He makes people think and parler
So this Christmas we
wish Harley
Lots of mistletoe and holly
Howie and Ernie
I did write an answer
to that, but it never got sent, mainly because it seemed to me that they had had the very successful last word, and anyway
New Year is a new year and who wanted to go on with the old stuff? However, just to show I was not indifferent (and if I can't
have the last word now, when can I?) - here it is:
[dated 2nd January 1987: unpublished]
Dear
Sir,
And a Happy New Year to you too, Howie and Ernie.
You wished me lots of mistletoe and holly -
It all arrived.
My room is covered thickly.
I do my best, but cannot be too jolly
When everywhere I sit is so damn prickly.
John
Harley
Even Verses: Relaxing into Verse
Serious
results or no, a lot of what I wrote was merely for fun (or nearly merely). The usual signal was that it appeared in verse
form, driving people to refer to it as my "poetry", though it certainly was never very poetic.
Example coming up.
The summer of 1988 in Hudson was memorable for the extraordinary antics our cars were called on to perform every time we went
to shop, or even to get from Hudson Heights to Como or back, and this was all on account of the restoration job aforesaid,
with Main Road dug up to some extreme depths, overhead wires often down, and some very bizarre daily placements of the pathetic
handful of "Detour" signs in use. Everyone was surprisingly good-humoured about it all.
Journey's End
('"The
road should be maintenance proof for 25 years," said Mayor Bradbury')
Lurching across no-man's-land
In my War One
tank,
Off to post a letter and
To visit at the bank.
In and out the shell holes then,
Watching out for wire,
Fearful lest I'm left for dead,
Sinking in the mire -
Past stern men in helmets where
They crouch along their
trench
(They're not talking English there!
Doesn't sound like French!)
Sudden with a fearful roar
Some pilot
drops his load
(Of gravel).
What is it that we're fighting for?
A Road to end all Roads -
As far as
Hudson was concerned I had first burst into verse in 1979, when the following appeared without warning preamble in the Letters
column of the Hudson Gazette. Up till then I had been exclusively prosy in that context. But this effusion seemed to strike
a sympathetic note of its own in a Hudson audience. And I believe that, in spite of all the encroachments that even Como has
been subjected to in the decade since these teasing lines appeared, the ambiance that they spoke of is still there.
Nevertheless,
there are references here that no longer apply. There are no longer two trains in the morning (let alone any others, need
one say?), and since then a few street lights have now been suffered to appear at tricky corners in Como, although they were
firmly rejected by the old guard there at the time when they were first installed in the rest of Hudson. And meetings of our
very English Players Club, to which I myself have become addicted, can no longer be held in the cosy atmosphere of the old
St Mary's Church Hall, destroyed by a disastrous fire in 1988 and since replaced by a modern but unfortunately reverberant
building.
The Gentlefolk of Como
How sweet to live in Como
Along the fringe-ed lake,
Where
trees grow as tradition does,
And nothing grows that's fake.
There all observe with quiet verve
Unwritten laws by
which
One sometimes cuts a friend, but not
The lily in the ditch.
The gentlefolk of Como
Are rather upper
class.
They tennis play on Saturday
And lie upon the grass;
They gather by the river
For martinis and for tea,
And
raise their voices with their glass
In jocund company.
The Como lady long has set
Within her country seat -
A
house that generally has
More history than heat.
She thinks the folk of Hudson
Are almost of the best,
But when
she goes to shop there
She feels she's going west.
The gentlefolk of Como
Are fond of watching plays
Where
lordly persons quack like ducks
And servants carry trays.
They sit for hours on wooden chairs
On nights of pouring
rain;
And when the roads lie deep in snow,
Good Lord, they come again.
The gentleman of Como
Lies longer in
his bed;
He catcheth not the seven o'clock
But th' half past seven instead;
And when at length rejoicing
He homeward
comes at night,
I think he goes aroving
Those streets that have no light.
The folk that live in Como
Enjoy
a state of grace -
They speak in other accents,
They make a different face.
Yet though they view the rest of us
Bifocally,
I pray
Their English ways may long amaze
The Seigneurie Vaudreuil.
It was quite easy to set these
lines to a tune - almost any Scottish Psalm tune would do, but we usually used "The Church's One Foundation", appropriately
Anglican - and we sang it in quartet at the next Players Club AGM.
It seemed only fair to balance that offering
with another one, both for the other end of town and for that contrasting element of Hudson's incoming population which was
obviously dedicated to the various confusing creeds of conspicuous consumption. This song, which I believe was actually first
sung by St James Church Choir of which I was then a member, was set to the tune of that well-known harvest festival hymn,
"We plough the fields and scatter", of which it is a parody.
Song for Hudson Heights [unpublished]
We
rake the lawn and scatter
Weed killer on the grass.
We hoard organic matter,
We take a fitness class.
We jog
throughout the spring-time,
We jog through winter nights;
We're just the kind of people
To live in Hudson Heights.
All
good gifts around us
Are sent for our delight
So thank the Lord, O thank the Lord,
For Hu-u-udson Heights.
We
gather all our leaves up
In orange plastic sacks.
We treat our trees with fungicide,
We treat our cars with wax.
We
never let our dogs squat
Upon our grassy plains,
Where only tanks are septic,
With soft refreshing drains.
All
good gifts around us
Are owed us for our pains,
So thank the Lord, O thank the Lord,
For soft refreshing
drains.
The children sail a Laser -
One each for boy and girl -
And Mother wears a blazer
When she goes off
to curl.
It's simple country living
And so, to quell her fears,
She gets around with 4-wheel drive
And fifteen
forward gears.
Such good things around us,
We'd better quell our fears,
And thank the
Lord, O thank the Lord,
For fifteen forward gears.
I shall get back to the Players Club and
other trifles, but let me take up again the thread of nagging at the Council. It was in the year before the Great Earthworks
replaced our town centre for the summer that another manifestation of progress was borne in on all of us, in the shape - though
that's hardly the word for any but the strongest of smells - of the odour of rotten eggs (i.e. sulphuretted hydrogen) as it
emerged from the tap from the average water heater. Nobody seemed able to do anything fundamental about this, the problem
being underground in the water table - perhaps because the expanding population was putting a strain on supplies.
Various
ideas about causes and solutions were floated in the Letters column. I thought there might be a positive side to this development,
one that the Mayor might even have planned -
[20th January 1988]
Dear Sir,
I haven't yet, but I expect to find the following any day now, posted on the usual pole:
" Election Address
"
" Citizens! A mild Hurrah!
Hudson's going to be a Spa -
Now our water really smells
We can call it Hudson
Wells,
Turning fairly honest dollars
Treating agues, gout, and cholers.
(No need to lock up your daughters -
Just
ensure they drink the waters.)
" Genteel folk will throng to enter
Our new Recreation Centre
Where (instead
of Skip and Jump Room)
All will gather in the Pump Room,
Chatting till they make a lull for
Quaffing daily quarts
of sulphur.
(Tea-time music too - Gadzooks -
Played by Back Roads, in perukes!)
"Hudson has what spas demand
-
Scenery to beat the band;
Gardens, trees on every site;
Culture at its most polite
(Even at our Chateau Hilton
People
sit and talk of Milton);
Maids demure and handsome hairy 'uns;
Scores of valetudinarians.
" Whine no more
then, you complainers -
Businesses will all be gainers!
It's our Mayor's secret dream,
Super tax-collecting scheme!
Pay no heed to any wailer!
Leave it all to our J. Taylor! "
Hope this finds you, dare I think,
As
it leaves me - in the stink.
And this example enables me to lead in, getting a bit more serious again, to
the recent and I suppose still unfinished story of the Alstonvale campaign, which as far as my writings were concerned began
and ended with the deployment, for a purpose, of some more light-hearted verses. But this affair perhaps deserves its own
new section.
About Alstonvale; not so Relaxed
1989,
the year in which the Town's proposal for rezoning the area of the Alstonvale development project was fought to referendum,
revealed more dramatically then ever before a deep division underlying the apparently serene and friendly surface of the Hudson
community. A saving grace of the place, which appears otherwise to be a dormitory for commuters to Montreal, is that a number
of people either work there - in both languages - or are long-time residents, and they have strong mutual bonds established
over life-times of acquaintanceship. For what is probably now a much larger number, however - and I must count myself among
them, although I have described how inadvertent was my arrival - it is basically a playground, with attractions of a largely
environmental kind in which to garden, pass our weekends, and retire.
It is a paradox about dwellers in the playgrounds
that they don't typically keep their eye on the political ball, and that is why the referendum was eventually lost to the
old guard, who did. Large numbers of playground dwellers either did not vote at all or voted for the Alstonvale Project shop
window, and thus consigned the major part of the remaining woodland within Hudson boundaries (roughly the size of the town
itself) to the process of environmental attrition that has already radically altered the amenity of the regions beyond. The
traffic of a yet much larger population with urban habits now dominates these regions, and the possibility of Hudson remaining
an enclave, protected both by the river and by its own original standards, has been much diminished.
So the various
campaigns mounted by groups or individuals for or against the project, of which mine was only one and very minor, came either
to defeat or victory in a wounding climax, capped by a municipal election also characterised by the usual - but, to some,
unexpectedly nasty - features. The division in the community, having among others its aspects of class struggle, has always
been surreptitiously exploited by local politicians (on both sides) whenever a vote has looked to be critical. As I write,
another summer is here, and Meech Lake has torpedoed the real estate market, so the playground dwellers are once more happily
engaged with their cruisers, their swimpools and parties, their renovations, garden contractors, landscaping and other expensive
toys, while no trees have as yet been felled nor roads driven in Alstonvale. Serenity, you might think, reigns once more.
[That
was written before shots were fired at Oka.]
Although the Mayor had then been quietly preparing the ground
for two years, and the recently formed Residents Association, with their ears to that ground, had been making warning noises
for some time, I personally did not see my call to intervene until Ernie Frohloff offered himself as a convenient target.
In a letter to the Hudson Gazette he once more aggressively defended the Council for its support of the Alstonvale Project,
concluding rather too optimistically by mentioning his personal expectation, in the face of all the evidence, that such development
would lower his municipal taxes.
So I thought I'd give it a bit of rhyme, with a catchy tune. I wrote one verse.
Then a month later I attached to another letter (given below) two more verses of the same, calling the whole thing this time
"The Marching Song of the Alstonvale Projectors". (I am disappointed that I never heard any of them singing it.)
[15th
April 1989]
Dear Sir,
My response to Councillor Frohloff's letter of last week is designed to be sung in chorus
to the tune of Tannenbaum (also known to some as the tune of the carol "O Christmas Tree", and to others as that of The Red
Flag):
O Alstonvale,
O Alstonvale,
How can you lie there useless?
With pointless fields
Of cheapo
grass
And woods both pine- and spruce-less?
So let us bring
Bulldozers in
And clear the woods with axes -
And
floor the lot
With astroturf
To keep down Ernie's taxes.
[four weeks later]
O
Hudson town,
You're going down,
So why not go down smiling?
Let's do whatev-
er Council says -
Their ways
are so beguiling!
How can a place
Have value if
No-one makes money off it?
(Those birds and trees
And all that
stuff
Have never shown a profit.)
O Alstonvale,
O Alstonvale!
Your slopes are almost virgin -
Condition
which,
With males around,
Stirs procreative urgin'.
So let us strip
Your zone apart
And never mind the hubbub,
Till Hudson has
Joined St. Lazare
In one continuous subbub.
The letter to which these two last verses
had been attached was aimed at the target offered by Mr. Gibb Stewart QC, who ran an individual campaign of his own on behalf
of the Alstonvale Project, and who launched an attack on the Residents Association of Hudson as a small group of power-seeking
conspirators, who were maligning Council and thus offending the electorate. (This was to become a common theme in the hostilities,
echoed with unsurprising unanimity by Councillors and their would-be successors, and could be said to have had its debut in
this letter.)
As is probably clear by now, I had learned the benefits of counter-attacking from the flank, as it were,
having turned down an earlier invitation to join the executive of the RAH, and indeed having delayed joining the Association
until it had become established.
So, believing in the integrity of the Association, having attended its meetings
(as Gibb had so far not), I charged:
[12th May 1989]
Dear Sir,
I
must congratulate Gibb Stewart for demonstrating to perfection the ancient art of wielding a double-barreled rhetorical shotgun,
firing generalizations in two directions simultaneously so as to create an instant confrontation - angry sounding and chest-beating,
naturally - between two entire classes of person who otherwise might never have been aware that they were supposed to be at
war.
This time-honoured technique has usefully been employed throughout history to maintain those intellectually
comical postures called by various words ending with the suffix -ism, such as Racism, Sexism, Imperialism, and the like. Perhaps
we can call this one Municipal Councilism.
Seizing on a single sentence from a lengthy argument in the letter of
one individual, Gibb's trained lawyer's eye enables him first to detect a conspiracy not only among all the letter writers
who in recent weeks have fired off their reactions to Ernie Frohloff's opening salvo, but also among the whole membership
of the Residents' Association - a considerable group. Then with the practised ease of a Q.C. he turns swiftly to generalise
- this time concerning the target of this alleged campaign - from Councillor Frohloff not only to all the Council, but also
to the "solid" majority of the municipal electorate of Hudson.
Thus in an instant the membership of the R.A.H. finds
itself deemed to have deliberately insulted the electorate of Hudson, to which apparently it is thought not to belong.
I
have one or two other difficulties about the Q.C.'s proposition. If this was a premeditated campaign, how did the plotters
know that Ernie Frohloff was going to write that letter? (Perhaps Ernie was in on the plot. Of course! that would explain
it. What an interesting supposition!) But then, as one of those who myself wrote one of those letters - albeit in rhyme -
I wish someone had told me what was going on; I'd really like for once to have been in on a plot. But, naively enough, I thought
all those people who disliked the idea of the Alstonvale Project had really meant what they were saying...
Yours
etc.
More of our older residents joined the letter-writing fray, going on about how trustworthy Mayor Bradbury
was and how untrustworthy newcomers are. And meanwhile the last touches had been put to the Main Road reconstruction, so I
thought we owed the Mayor thanks for what had really been a beautifully executed job, disproving all my previously expressed
apprehensions.
(I had said thanks to him personally, but he had growled something about it being about time, after
having had to read all those [miserable] letters I had written.)
[4th June
1989]
Dear Sir,
This would seem a good moment (springtime) for me to change heart and join the Patriarch's Association
of Hudson (PAH!) in singing the praises of Mayor Bradbury. The recent and astonishingly swift completion of the revamping
of the Main Road up to Mullan's, together with the bonus of the renewal of the sidewalk up to Birch Hill, has completed a
magnificent job that has done wonders for the appearance and self-respect of our town.
It is now an easy pleasure
- shared I see by many - to stroll townwards enjoying other people's gardens for free, in the style that gives life here some
of its unique charm. This past week the new section was fragrant with lilac (one might call it Lilac Alley) thanks in part
to the careful tact with which bushes on the south margin, that were within the Town's powers to rip out, have been left untouched.
The hand that has controlled with sensitivity such details, throughout the operation, has thus left a personal sign on the
already comely face of Hudson that will last a long time. And that hand, as in almost everything that happens or even that
doesn't happen around here, is Mayor Bradbury's.
I am glad to be able to say this now, so that I may not be accused
of intervening in any way in the municipal elections that will be held later in the year. It would certainly not be doing
the Mayor any good to be praising him openly like this at that time, for that would be in breach of an ancient and well-founded
political principle - namely that in any election people vote not for someone but against someone else. The conclusion to
be drawn from this premise (well understood by professional politicians but not usually grasped by the amateur enthusiast)
is to be careful not to offer a clear target that can be voted against.
Thus the outcome of the elections in Hudson
will as usual be determined by whose head is showing above the skyline to be shot at. This rule of thumb applies just as much
to groups of people who make their opinions conspicuous, as to individuals. And so organizations like PAH! and RAH! (the Residents'
Association of Hudson), and TCHAH! (the Town Councillors Heroworshipping Association of Hudson) had better watch what they
say in public when the time comes. It's only what people say in private around here that has ever determined how things get
done, and people elected.
So you probably won't find me praising the Mayor like this again. I'm sure he'll be greatly
relieved to hear me say so.
Yours etc.
Clearly much of this was tongue in cheek
and relied on the Mayor's sense of humour. I was really trying to warn the Residents Association while taking the mickey out
of their opponents. These had reason to be alarmed because a lot more people were thinking for themselves about the development
situation than was comfortable for the Council. And it wasn't as if the Mayor was impartially above the situation.
But
he did fool me by not running again, when Fall came round. He had been Mayor for the best part of two decades, and I have
to admit now a very good one, though his public style in dealing with opposition - or even with bystanders - was that of a
street brawler, and I was against many of the things he did.
My next letter was different.
[9th
June 1989]
Dear Sir,
In the rather fulsome real estate blurb you featured last week on the Alstonvale Project the
Mayor is quoted as saying "It's a lovely development." The writer, and presumably the Mayor, did not choose to add to this
statement the necessary qualifying clause and phrase, "as developments go", and "on paper".
Last week I praised Mayor
Bradbury's judgment in making improvements to Main Road. This is different. When things have to be done to places where humans
have already squatted, he seems to know his stuff. But no human "development" - that euphemistic weasel word for massive interference
with the natural environment - is as "lovely" as a landscape left alone.
Much of that article, and many wiseacres
around here, lazily assume that there is something inevitable about the "development" of this particular element of Hudson's
environment. Would someone please convince me of that inevitability? Nobody needs the money, and there has appeared no compelling
reason to remove the zoning. That zoning has served to protect Hudson's setting, an immensely valuable asset to this community
that is reflected in the extraordinary status it still has throughout the Montreal region as a place to live.
If Hudson
of all places cannot resist taking the drug of development, as resolute communities elsewhere have shown can be done, then
it is less of a gutsy place than I think it is.
But perhaps we have already begun the addiction. And how after this
one, certainly, would there be anything left to resist? The mood-altering effects for some of us clearly began a while ago,
when the Mayor represented the unwitting citizens of this town, to the CPTAQ public hearing of 25th October 1988, as already
consenting to this development. The plan now appears to be to slip this proposal past us with all the familiar social blandishments,
and - as with so many political lemons - during the apathetic summer season.
The irreversible changes that would
ensue in the years down the line would destroy the character of Hudson - and the nearest piece of country would become Rigaud
Mountain. But who would care, for who would then have the character? This is what drugs do. They make you think that decline
is growth; and that any dopey, indolent indecision is a kind of wisdom.
Fortunately, a decision is still potentially
in our hands. We can - as we should say to any harmful drug - just say "No".
Yours etc.
The
summer wore on with rising tensions as the process towards referendum continued, so that an information meeting at the end
of July to present the Bylaw was heavily attended and was characterised by a good deal of raucous heckling when it came to
questions. The Residents Association, although over 200 strong, had been branded according to plan as a small clique of power-seekers,
and its President Heinz Heinrich, an Austrian from Czechoslovakia who had served the Allies in the Second World War, had once
again been smeared even in public by hints that he was a Nazi - a disgraceful ploy that throws a dishonorable light on those
who have never publicly condemned the slander, although they stood to - and did - gain from it.
The following admittedly
fairly lengthy letter was delayed in the press for three weeks before its actual publication, a fact that did affect adversely
the timing of some of its points; there had been a lot of letters, naturally, but at least one equally long on the other side
had meanwhile been given priority. Perhaps it was felt that I had had my share. On the other hand, the Editor had meanwhile
allowed his name to appear unobtrusively in a full-page advertisement as a supporter of the Alstonvale Project, and so of
course of the Bylaw to rezone.
[4th August 1989]
Dear Sir,
For
a community that considers itself friendly, there was a lot of anger at the Council's information meeting on Monday 31st July.
But the angry feelings being expressed were not those of the people questioning the zoning by-law. Unusually, and contrary
to the standard news story appearing in the Montreal Gazette, it was those who were defending the by-law who seemed upset,
and defiant, and otherwise emotionally aware that theirs might be a losing cause.
It emerged that two years ago Mayor
Bradbury had decided to arrange for the effective doubling of Hudson's rate of growth, from an average of 20 plus houses a
year to one of 35 to 40 from the Alstonvale Project alone. Now, the Mayor and his Council had been elected a year or two before
that, with a vote of confidence in his management of the day-to-day affairs of the town. But I don't suppose that anyone then
thought that the Mayor had been granted a mandate to play God single-handedly with the future of Hudson.
Late in the
meeting Councillor Duclos, a decent man, lamented that so little trust had been shown by those present who were understandably
concerned, and delivered a short sermon on the topic. But trust is a two-way street. On the one hand the Mayor and his Council
have not appeared to have had much trust in the judgment of the people they are meant to represent, for clearly it is only
Quebec law and not their own inclination that has forced them to present their decision to the community for approval. Their
action in pressing the matter through prematurely in vacation time, the conduct of the meeting itself, and their tendency
to smoke-screen or evade answers to questions and to interrupt the questioners (especially if they were women), did not encourage
the reciprocation of trust.
Nor are we encouraged by the record of municipal control in past and present developments,
their piecemeal approach to planning, and the amateurish manner in which these very by-laws are being handled. They expect
to make ad hoc by-laws for development after, and not before, this zoning by-law has been put through - an unsophisticated
and pretty unprofessional way of proceeding which leaves Hudson open to appalling risks.
The Mayor and Council are
volunteers with considerable hands-on experience, who do a great deal of work with little reward, and there is little point
in merely confronting them - to the point where they feel at bay - with the almost inevitable deficiencies as they face a
complicated and difficult task. Correspondingly, let us hope that they can, with all the resources and initiatives at their
disposal, deal magnanimously with the disagreements arising from their constituents.
I have to say, as one of those
constituents, that I have so far felt better represented by the Residents' Association, which I joined belatedly, than by
those who have been elected to represent me on Council. The meetings of the Association, contrary to an image publicized by
some who have never attended, are conducted in an atmosphere of thoughtfulness, expertise, and impartial attention to a wide
diversity of views - an atmosphere not particularly apparent on Monday night.
I have also to say that some things
I have heard being hinted about the leadership of the Residents' Association (and have read in your columns, Mr. Editor, by
one writer who failed to declare his interest in the Alstonvale project) are plainly despicable. I am ashamed for any of my
friends and acquaintances who have failed to quell these manifestations of racism, not to speak of those who have actually
repeated them and passed them along. Some otherwise sane and kindly people seem to have had bits of their humanity shot away
in the war. If Hudson is indeed the unusually friendly place that some Councillors claimed it to be, let us put an end to
this disgusting nonsense and start treating each other with some adult respect, no matter what our views are or where we were
born.
For some people still to believe that this zoning by-law is "no big deal", as Rick Frohloff claimed his acquaintances
do, is really pretty funny if you think about it. The Alstonvale Project must be quite the biggest "deal" to come Hudson's
way in a long time, quite apart from its immense implications for further growth, and I wonder if a number of men and women
at present engaged on a personal scale in trades or services in the village quite realise the consequences that the change
of scale from village to suburban centre would entail for them. With St. Lazare planning to go from 8,000 to 20,000, and Hudson
already sliding steadily in the same direction, they are likely to face outside competition of a sort they may not have bargained
for.
However, this particular change is not in the least inevitable, notwithstanding the various sermons on the inevitability
of change delivered to us by good Father Norris and the Reverend Putnam. As one speaker has put it, we have to recognise that
the future of the majority is being put at risk on behalf of the few. (Note: the one-time business "risk" taken by those few,
by acquiring or holding property in the expectation of its being "inevitably" rezoned, is now being called their "legitimate
expectations".) Once Hudson decides, in a fully worked-out development plan, that its woodland is to remain woodland, and
its rural features rural, there seems to be no reason why such a decision should not stick, no matter who buys land. Yours
etc.
The Alstonvale Projectors spent a fair bit of money rather effectively in the weeks before the vote by
renting an empty store in the town centre and manning a pretty display there, with the usual optimistic coloured maps that
developers go in for. A number of people who had not been following arguments closely up to that point were favourably impressed
by the selling job, for which the Residents Association offered no such counter except another pamphlet reiterating at tedious
length their rationale, and although 700 people were to vote against the Bylaw, it is likely that the referendum was lost
then and there.
A bit of humour and a bit of verse - I thought - might be timely as a cap to my own campaign. Fat
chance. The following relatively impartial offering - impartial at least compared to what had been coming in - was handed
in well in time, but never saw the light of day. I never got an explanation. But intimidation of the local press is all too
easy in Hudson, and it had happened before.
[September 1989: unpublished]
Vote!
Arise ye women! trowel in hand,
Friends of the wildlife and the land,
Who want old Hudson to remain -
Unburied
in suburban plain -
And vote against the Bylaw
Arise! ye hardened men of trade -
All good old boys of wisdom
made,
Realists, sceptics, those who win -
To do all those do-gooders in,
And vote against all those against
The
Bylaw
Arise! ye critics of the Council,
Each armed with briefcase and blue pencil.
Present your actuarial lumber
And
stir us up from decent slumber,
With 40 points to make against
All those against all those against
The
Bylaw
Rise up! ye wrathy Councillors
And sturdy fellows in the stores,
Who keep no track of "if" and "then",
But
know dam well who are the bores
(For money is money, and men are men).
Just vote against all those against
All
those against all those against
The Bylaw - (Got that?)
Envoi
But come, all you who know the
score
(Who've heard those playground cries before:
"We'll take our properties away -
So vote our way, or we won't
play")
Let love nor anger get your goat.
Think probabilities, and vote
And vote and vote and vote and vote -
And
let's forget the Bylaw.
So that should have been that. The vote was taken and the Bylaw endorsed by
some 900 to 700. However, when it was a good bit too late, there now appeared in traditional Anglo-Saxon fashion various pious
statements from pretty divisive people about how unfortunately divisive the whole experience had been for this formerly friendly
place. This disruption in the even tenor of our ways was of course really to be attributed - not to those who had attacked
the status quo of zoning in a very large area - but to those who had resisted that quite formidable change.
Among
the suddenly sad people were Councillor Ernie Frohloff, Sandy Edmison the point man for the Alstonvale syndicate, and the
writer of a wonderfully hypocritical letter to the Gazette timed for the eve of the municipal election that followed 3 weeks
later (which proved equally divisive); to whom I therefore addressed the following.
[The reference in this letter
to the Editor's suppression of my verses, at the end of the fourth paragraph, was not unexpectedly suppressed in the version
published.]
[1st November 1989]
Dear Sir,
Let me (along with I believe
many others in Hudson) congratulate D. Tobin on his outspoken letter about the acrimony with which our affairs in Hudson have
recently been conducted. It was surely wise that in a letter so brimming with goodwill, the writer should have refrained from
mentioning any evidence of the complete falsehoods and half truths quite properly denounced therein.
It is outrageous
indeed that an active, vociferous few should have transgressed our democratic rights and protections so far as to force on
the town a costly referendum, in which their views were finally revealed to be supported by only seven hundred others, all
of whom were clearly ignorant or misinformed or politically motivated or something.
Of course D. Tobin is not politically
motivated. He (or she) merely wanted to ensure that the readers vote for the right people, not the wrong ones. One has to
agree that it is monstrous that anyone at all should have the impudence to run for election, instead of accepting by acclamation
some complete slate designed by the retiring council to gain control of our Town Hall, thus avoiding another costly process.
(I have been trying, so as to avoid further acrimony, to echo the exact language used by D. Tobin.)
Clearly the recent
divisiveness and acrimony are to be deplored. The remarks to this effect of Councillor Frohloff and Mr. Edmison, published
since the Alstonvale vote, are positively saintly - they have prompted me to attempt another version of "When the Saints go
marching in". And let me congratulate you also, Mr. Editor, for your own modest contributions to a restoration of confidence,
with your timely publication on the eve of a vote of such conciliatory letters as D. Tobin's; and with your equally timely
suppression, on the eve of a vote, of one of mine - which after all was on the wrong side, and moreover regrettably couched
in execrable verse.
Seriously however I suggest this, to anyone who is really concerned about the social climate
in Hudson. That you reflect to what extent your language and tone, when reacting to disagreements as they arise, take into
account the absolute right of others to express their points of view, no matter how few or lonely they may be. And that you
recognize the probability that they are as right as you are, or as wrong. Any real healer is aware of the probability of a
mote in his or her own eye.
The right of a dissident to a hearing is certainly as good as anyone else's, on council
or off, elected or unelected, and if you do anything to discourage it you are no democrat. By all means stand up to people,
but don't put them down. This may be difficult under apparent provocation, of course. Genuine democracy is not easy to take,
and it is not for nothing that it is for adults only. Yours etc.
The
version of "When the Saints" I referred to - there - never did get published; but (why not?) I might as well put it in here
for what it's worth - which isn't really very much.
[November 1989: unpublished]
Song for
the Saints of Alstonvale
Oh when the Saints
Oh when the Saints
Oh when the Saints go movin' in!
I wanna have
Some
of their numbers
When the Saints go movin' in!
And when the trees
And when the trees
And when the trees
begin to fall!
I wanna have
Some of that lumber
When the trees begin to fall!
And when the grabs ...
start lifting dirt
I wanna grab
Some of that pay dirt
When the grabs start lifting dirt.
And when those lots
... go up for sale
I would like
Some of those numbers
When those lots go up for sale.
But when their claims
But
when their claims
But when their claims come home to roost!
I wouldn't want to be
Of their number
When their
claims come home to roost!
Dogs' Do - and I Don't
"
' I don't ' what? " you might ask. I don't not like dogs.
Let me say that more emphatically, as there are some people
- merely because I have made rather a thing at times about what some dogs do - who have believed otherwise: I DON'T not like
dogs. Or to put it another way - I don't NOT like dogs.
I get along very well with nearly all dogs - we understand
each other, especially as each of us, usually, knows our place. But bossy dogs, noisy dogs, and dogs who think their Place
is round the hedge and in the middle of my lawn, do not with me - I do admit - strike a sympathetic chord.
I guess
Hudson readers became very familiar with my position on this topic, as I tended to go on and on about it rather. In 1986 I
fired an opening salvo at those huge animals that many newer residents seem to think necessary for their defence (and are
usually kept behind de fence. Get it, eh?) in this wild frontier town:
The big loud dogs of Hudson
Are quite a fearful
bore:
They lie about on porches,
Or lurk behind a door -
From where they bawl and shout and yell
At neighbour
or at stranger,
And make you wonder where the hell
Is all the frightful danger?
They none of them could feed
themselves,
They're not much fun to pat,
They're good at knocking children down
And bullying the cat.
Indulgently
their owners say
They don't mean to offend -
(Who'd rather scare a thief away
Than welcome in a friend.)
Envoi
Soon
we shall all, O Canada,
Be friendless, if quite free -
And have us German shepherds all
To stand on guard for thee!
Well,
that appeared as a letter in the Hudson Gazette of 19th February 1986 (only the paper couldn't believe I meant that such dogs
were "good at knocking children down" and ingeniously if rather inconsistently substituted "tracking children down"); and
the next week there appeared in the Letters column a reply from Jill Baird, as independently-minded a lady as you can get,
who never hesitated to speak out in defence of any natural thing when she felt it threatened by unnatural phenomena. In her
book I was now clearly one of those. (I had not long before written that letter about the downtown "rural slum".)
John!
What
can we do with you?
Who loves us not!
Our dogs.
Our cats.
Our streets.
Our ways.
In Hudson home the warmth
of heart,
The very feel of being here,
From which you are
Apart. Jill Baird
I couldn't
leave it, or her, at that. So, on 5th March -
Dear Sir,
To Jill I kneel in full contrition
For she has said,
in phrases tart,
Hudson's a holy proposition
From which I am
Apart.
How damaging the preposition
With
which such phrases start!
Might it not be a coalition
Of which I am
A part?
(And the Gazette managed
to make that mysterious by printing the first line as "To fill I kneel...” Mind you, my handwriting -
(Then they
had to bury the second verse several pages away near the Classifieds, so I am sure no one knew what I was talking about, including
Jill.)
On 6th August of that year there had appeared a rather large token, by no means for the first time, right
in the middle of my lawn. I tried to be careful to disguise some of my language about it; for this, as they always say, was
a family newspaper -
Address to the Deaf
(written with great care, to avoid undue offence,
After cleaning my
shoes)
Wilful and mindless canine beast
(I dare not mention dog)
Why have you crept upon my lawn
During your
morning jog?
How would you like it if I came
And passed upon your kennel?
What if the neighbours' kids should
dig
Through all your flowers a tunnel -
And spread your garbage in the street,
And carry on like jerks -
Run
shrieking at your owner's feet
With fusillade of berks? -
Oh, would he not near blow his top,
Prating of discipline,
And
summon parents and a cop
To come and run them in?
But should I do as you have done
He'd really do his nut -
And
all because, on morning run,
I'd hit upon your shut.
A year later (21st October 1987) it was still happening,
not altogether surprisingly, but this time I got lyrical and wrote a ballad, as Wordsworth had done under much less provocation
-
Wordsworth in Hudson
Once more I alter mowing course,
Once more I use the trowel.
O Creature,
shall I call thee Dog,
Or but a wandering Bowel?
In July 1988 I finally tumbled to what had been
happening on Brisbane Avenue (where I live, in Hudson Heights) - and a remarkable but eminently satisfactory explanation it
turned out to be -
A Nature Note from Higher Hudson
There's an elephant on Brisbane that's hardly ever seen.
You
cannot tell where he will be - you only know he's been.
His spoor falls as the gentle rain upon my fresh-cut lawn,
And
lies there gently steaming, in the fragrant hour of dawn.
Deep dappled in the bosky shade he whiles the hours away,
Whisking
the flies at either end until the close of day -
Then tiptoes through the twilight along the quiet lane
And does his
business where he will, on Avenue Brisbane.
So what, if sight of pachyderm has ne'er been proven here?
No mortal
dog would ever leave so huge a souvenir.
The Eastern Arctic Elephant stands yet to be revealed -
In habit shy and reticent
- prefers to stay concealed.
He never leaves a footprint, in damp earth or in snow.
Yet spoor is unmistakeable,
and that is how I know
That Eastern Arctic elephants - though reticent and shy -
Adapting to environments, have now
learned how to fly.
Thus through the blizzard, fog, or night, they glide their hidden way -
The coat in winter
brilliant white, in spring a pearly grey -
And this is why no one has yet observed them come and go
To drop their gracious,
warm giftlets upon the place below.
When something heavy's overhead - "A plane from Mirabel!",
How oft at night
'tis sagely said. Best mutter, "Is it hell!"
And best stand out from under there (where anything might fall)
As the
elephant from Brisbane goes by to pay his call.
Odd Letters
To
return now to the beginning of all this, it seems that some years passed before I hit my stride as a writer of letters to
the Lake of Two Mountains Gazette, as it was then. The two letters below might be considered the first ones really comfortably
written, which is not to say that I hadn't been nagging away, about twice or three times a year, before 1974.
Apart
from my being a newcomer, there was another explanation for my having been on my best behaviour. As President of the Home
and School in 1970-71, I had been in the public eye at a time of considerable parental upset about drugs (their first impact
on Hudson), school uniforms, and the first of many proposed governmental and apparently lunatic reorganizations of school
boards, that were to keep on creating crises, especially for Hudson, up through the 80's - never mind the continuing discontents
of teachers and the consequent strikes.
As a professional, being a member of the Faculty of Education at McGill,
I had always regarded these developments as on the whole positive - in Quebec at least, education was on the move - but that
only meant I had to be pretty dashed careful in how I said anything on such topics to lay people. (I suppose various acquaintances
will have a good laugh about the idea of me being careful.)
In 1971 or so I became a member of a Sub-committee
of the Long Range Planning Committee, the large scale exercise led by Heinz Heinrich that had enlisted the energies and abilities
of many residents in thinking about Hudson's future. It was intended to supplement the work of the Council, of which he was
a member; but instead this enterprise seemed to offend some of his colleagues, who characteristically regarded it as a threat
to their own powers. This sort of obtuse obloquy was to dog his footsteps for two decades thereafter.
The sub-committee
I was on, however, submitted a report on the salting of roads which Council received quite amiably, adopting many of its recommendations
in its subsequent policy. Clearly I had had this report in mind when writing the following letter; but it also represents
things I felt then - including the feeling that a number of my wealthier fellow residents were part of the problem - that
were still to be in the forefront 16 years later during the Alstonvale campaign.
Road salt and development [7th
March 1974]
Dear Sir,
Mrs. Winston's letter was pretty timely - I think all of us are looking
over our shoulders this winter at the development that we hear about on all sides. The striking thing for me about her letter
was the part where the local councillor of this rural place being destroyed in Ontario made out to her that it was all a very
good thing.
That seems so entirely typical of the whole scenario, so typical that we pass its utter perversity by
without a murmur. Time and again a group apparently elected by all the people of a locality go right ahead and encourage things
to happen that nobody really wants to happen; and in the end the whole point of their being there is destroyed. Gradually,
of course. Each step is taken in good faith.
How does this come about? Take for instance the extraordinary salting
of our roads this winter, which I have heard no-one say a good word for. If the majority of the residents of Hudson don't
want salt on the roads - in fact positively detest it and its effects on pedestrians, dogs, cars, shrubs, hedges and trees
- how is it that it is being done at all? It's not even as if this was something well-established and difficult to change
because of vested interest; it has only just been brought in. A year or two ago we were getting on very well without it. There
was a citizens' protest early last summer, and a joint committee of council and protesters was formed to investigate and recommend.
I haven't heard of that committee since. Did they recommend this?
I don't suppose the present council started it just
in order to benefit all those lads who belt around on our roads all weekend for something to do, just as they do in summer.
There's an "economic" money reason somewhere. And there's a money reason in all the development too, of course. When commercial
interests want something done, all resistance becomes half-hearted.
If having more people in the area means more
business and money for a few people in the area, then no one seems able to put up a real argument. On the contrary, one does
not deny a man his right to make a livelihood; if his livelihood depends on his making money, one cannot therefore get in
his way. People seem unable in our age to distinguish between making a livelihood and making money.
And it must be
very difficult for a councillor in Hudson to resist granting rights of money-making out here, when a great number of his constituents
exercise those rights on a much larger scale each day in Montreal by making money there.
Yours
etc.
The basic idea of the spoof that quickly followed the above was prompted by reflection on the
huge quantities of salt then being poured on our roads and the insoluble fact that it doesn't simply go away, but stays in
ground water wherever that goes to, which of course round here is the Lake. So if that built up over the years, then logically
what would you get - but a salt-water lake. The rest ("entirely predictable" as I said with tongue in cheek) followed -
But
it's interesting in a way, as with all such predictions, to discover how many changes along the route described here have
either not taken place (not surprisingly, but thank God all the same) or have taken place in a manner entirely unforeseen
by me. For I was trying.
So had the Town been trying, actually. As the context below suggests, there had been held,
not long before, an information meeting for the town concerning a prettily illustrated plan which among other things had shown
a "lagoon" in the middle of Stirling Simon 's farm. Stirling had expressed his views on this idea, which were not favourable,
in his usual pithy fashion.
I have put in square brackets [] the occasional marker to indicate where things indeed
now are.
Hudson's perhaps future [14th March 1974]
Dear Sir,
Organizations sometimes
offer prizes for essay competitions about the future - "Canada in 2000" and so on - but the effect usually is to encourage
people to indulge in pipe-dreams in which they merely escape from their current irritations.
I would like to see the
Hudson Long Range Planning Committee or some such outfit sponsor a competition about Hudson in which the rules invite the
imagination to play along somewhat more realistic lines, combining the unexpected with the entirely predictable - given that
people are simply unlikely in the future to do anything effectively different from what they are doing now. In this way the
writers and others may be less surprised and indignant when things actually turn out that way.
Something like this
perhaps:
Twenty years from now [i.e. in 1994!], one of my sons is bringing one of his families back to see the
old place. They turn off the old TransCanada with its rusty signs and float down the hill in their used hovercraft. Threading
through the traffic swirling round the Snelgrove Plaza [4 Corners] - a popular place as its vast parking area testifies, built
over the Metro stop on Route 17 [342] - he spins along the quaint 4-lane Boulevard St Charles between the massed bungalows
screening the Whitlock Driving Range and Nature Trail on the one hand, and Simon's Farm [Shocan development] on the other.
A glimpse of the latter at the foot of the hill gives him his first stab of memory, for the place seems unchanged (there is
certainly no sign of any "dammed municipal lagoon").
Jostled between throngs of motor kites and minicars racing between
the traffic lights, he nearly misses the old home [No. 97], now a rooming house for students at the CEGEP, with its plastic
trees and hedges and worn astroturf littered with their snowmobiles and discarded computer tape. The playing fields of the
school are now wholly occupied by the CEGEP's modern Contemplation Centre, with all-weather track and glassed-in swimming
pool at the 15th floor, just below the landing pad and radio station.
With a sinking heart he turns on to Main.
The
long lines of imitation elms carrying power lines and street lights are too straight and uniform to be convincing, even if
some of the automatic foliage weren't out of phase - displaying reds, oranges, and yellows in the midst of July. A busload
of tourists is just entering Mullan's Store, which looks brilliantly neat as a restored historic site. But further on, the
town centre is now clearly a slum; the houses gone, the later commercial buildings replacing them no less ugly than the earlier
ones, the bowling alley [destroyed by fire, June 1973; replaced years later by Gramegna's Garden Centre] still roofless though
there are signs of squatters, the sky dark with the tangle of power lines.
He suddenly speeds up the ramp to the bridge
[a bridge was indeed threatened at the time] over to Mirabel, ignoring the noisy grief of his children, who have spotted the
Funfair at the Yacht Club, for he only wants to get away. But at this height he has a wonderful view down the river in each
direction, even to where the town ends and the trees begin again, and he notes with nostalgic approval the sails dotting its
surface - though rather more crowded than before. There are all the lobster boats and the popular cod-fishing excursions plying
busily from Mallette's Wharf, that splendid imitation of an old-time Maine anchorage.
The wave-making machine under
the Ile aux Tourtes bridge is in action, and as the breakers roll in among the bathers on the Quarry Point beaches, he reflects
with pleasure on that stroke of provincial genius that had made the best of a bad business and turned the salt-laden waters
of the Lake of Two Mountains into a full-scale inland sea - with tides controlled from Carillon, free of pollution from oil-spills,
and enhancing Montreal as the tourist centre par excellence of eastern Canada...
Well, maybe someone else can
take it from there.
Yours etc.
If the letter that follows were to be
included at all - on the grounds that it makes, quite well, points that still deserve attention in Hudson - then this would
seem to be the place even if it is out of the time sequence, having been written in 1981, some seven years later.
I'd
have to admit, however, that the doom and disaster scenario for trees that I drew up here has hardly been borne out by the
evidence before our eyes ten years later, even though the study we had made drew upon the best scientific evidence available.
'Twas ever thus for the well-intentioned environmentalist; the gods of science are not as much in control as God Himself,
or Herself, or Itself, in fact is.
Also about salt [22nd January 1981]
Dear Sir,
Mr.
Seybould's letter is timely. On walks around Hudson I have noticed that the salting of roads is now being done not only more
intensively but also more extensively than I believe the Town's guidelines should permit.
The Council in 1975 named
certain main roads and one or two very steep places to be given "bare pavement" treatment (meaning salt). In addition, junctions
of roads were to be so treated. Otherwise, residential roads were to be ploughed and graded and treated if necessary with
abrasives only, to meet the criterion of "safety with reasonable care". I do not recall Birchhill, Wilson Avenue, Fairhaven,
and Cavagnal Crescent, to name a few, being designated as bare pavement roads permitting "speed with safety".
As
Mr. Seybould observes, salt is pretty expensive, both before and after use. It has permanent consequences that are literally
incalculable. Carried into clay soil by water, it does not leave it as water does but simply accumulates year by year, decade
by decade. It kills many kinds of trees, especially maples, and its long term effects on other vegetation are certainly harmful.
Left in the heavy, unmelted concentrations I have been seeing, it actually encourages the formation of ice, and of
greater than normal slippery conditions, by attracting and retaining water and even raising the freezing point. It increases
the frequency of thaw and refreeze and so breaks up road surfaces more quickly. There are many other unwelcome effects.
When
the study was made in response to which the Council's decisions were taken in 1975, we found that each mile of road in Hudson
had received an average of 34 tons of salt over the previous three years. Of course main roads have since continued to be
salted. Since 1971 then, one may estimate that each mile of main road has received over 100 tons, most of which must still
be in the immediate neighbourhood. That's one ton every 17 yards. Imagine all those sacks standing there!
I live on
a main road, but my trees die on it. Anyone who lives along a road where salt is now being strewn, but should not be, has
reason to assume that damage is being done to his property - even with ditches around, because you never know the routes taken
by ground water. I don't think we should let it go on, just so that we may indulge that imperious lack of patience to which
we feel entitled by virtue of getting about by machinery. Yours etc.
When
we first came to Hudson the lights on the roads were pleasantly dim and yellow and about 40 watts, indicating at best where
the road was and otherwise interfering not at all with whatever Nature wanted to do about our getting around at night. I remember
watching fabulous aurora displays from the front steps, and quiet fragrant nights of starlight. This of course wouldn't do.
With
little warning that I was aware of, our houses one night in 1975 were discovered to be bathed in brilliant blue light from
the front, and the gardens at the back washed in pale grey as in an eclipse of the sun. Mayor Bradbury, who liked to surprise
his electorate - or at least preferred not to let them know what he had in mind - had pulled off in secret another municipal
coup. Everywhere, except in Como and in a defiant bit of Mount Victoria, the place now lay exposed like a prison camp.
There
had followed a week or two of public statements, from the Police Chief, and from Councillor Putnam in his column called Council
Corner, in explanation or should I say extenuation of the installation of new lighting, though not of the manner in which
it had been done.
Nights with lights, and a lonely firefly [19th June 1975]
Dear
Sir,
No one asked for them, but now they're here I suppose we have to make the best of it. It's not that they don't
offer some unexpected if bizarre advantages. Anyone can walk comfortably about my house at night now without turning on a
light; the other night I gave myself a bowl of cereal - found a spoon, selected my packet, spread enough sugar and poured
the right amount of milk, all without hesitation in what we formerly called the dark. I might have read a book at the window
without trouble (though not with much pleasure either; I'd rather have been asleep).
But as I stood there in the kitchen,
my eye hypnotically transfixed by the distant purplish glare of one of the dozen new lights across the field, I became aware
of something else in the stillness. A firefly, winking past a nearby bush. There must have been others, for it was one of
those magical, warm, glimmering nights we used to have when nature holds its breath, but in that wan, blue-bleached haze I
had not seen them.
Was the sky starlit - who knows? I would have had to drive up to St Lazare to find out.
As
I stood there I realized that apart from the fireflies nothing was astir in all the township round. There had been no traffic
for hours - perhaps one car had passed along the Côte road - and yet the lights blazed on along every street of Hudson like
the perimeter lights along barbed wire in some great concentration camp. Now this was bloody ridiculous.
Not only
have these blinding lights been foisted upon us, so that there can be hardly a house or garden in the place that is not invaded
by their unwinking stare, but this inexplicable surveillance continues long past the hour when anyone conceivably needs it,
to ensure that our country night is utterly stamped out. Here we are out in Hudson living as though in the middle of Decarie
Circle. When the leaves are down in wintertime it will all be for many more hours of night, and far less bearable. Say goodbye
to the auroras, in their awesome silences; and hayrides no more.
What, O Town Council, is the point? And please don't
bring up "vandalism". If Mr. Putnam knew how often I, and many like me, have felt the urge to smash every one of those things
in sight, he might change his mind about their probable effect on that kind of crime.
Let me propose, since we have
them up now, that a balance be struck between the needs of those who dash up and down our roads in cars and the needs of the
rest of us who have quieter expectations of life in Hudson. Let's turn all those lights off between 11 at night and 6 in the
morning. Why not? Cars have headlights after all.
And what is the evidence about "vandalism" - is Mat Night any
worse than it used to be? Is it a question between saving on police or on amenity? Or is it the case that Hydro Quebec,
rumoured to be the donor of this dubious bounty, would put difficulties in the way of our running up smaller electricity bills
than they had planned for us?
I am entirely serious in making this proposal. I believe our Council owe it to us, after
acting without warning or consultation in installing these lights - an ominous precedent - to make genuine restitution of
some of the amenities of which we have been suddenly and arbitrarily deprived.
Yours etc.
Nobody
on Council really listened to this laboriously prepared and lengthy document. Instead, they probably gave credit to the much
simpler and - I had to admit - rhetorically far more effective letter from our neighbour Gwen Rattray, that appeared the next
week. Who couldn't help liking Gwen and Don, the former Principal to whom the High School owed its glory days?
[26th
June 1975]
Dear Sir,
Let there be light all over the world, especially in front of our house. Love it. Thank you
Hudson. Gwen Rattray
It had been Don Rattray who had headed up the Citizens' Committee (or some
such title) that had selected the slate of good men and true - and, in a really progressive move, for Hudson, one woman! -
to run for this Council in 1973. At the time it had seemed a good idea, for the committee were an outstanding group of people.
But
actually of course, as all such ostensibly friendly variants on genuinely democratic procedure are condemned to be, it wasn't
a good idea. This Council proceeded to behave no differently from all the others that were to follow up till the present;
and I have been surprised, reading these letters over again, to what extent we were all doomed to repeat ourselves over these
two decades, I suppose because no-one in Town Hall had time to listen between elections.
(Warning: if you are only
vaguely interested in the story of our municipal politics, reading this letter could be terminal. Most of it has been said
elsewhere in these letters. It was the fact of the repetition itself that seemed interesting to me.)
Election slates [15th
September 1977]
Dear Sir,
I hear we are shortly to have elections for the Town Council. I hope we do.
I
hope we do not have, as we did last time, some arrangement whereby our councillors are virtually chosen for us, no doubt in
a well-intentioned way, so that candidates who have not succeeded in some private process of selection by a group of 'in'
people start out with a clear disadvantage in any voting that does take place. Such processes, while perhaps saving good candidates
the embarrassment of having their merits and failings publicly discussed in the competitive atmosphere of an election, have
the effect - disastrous for the community at large - of rendering those who thus almost automatically become councillors virtually
indifferent to the wishes of those who should have voted for them - or at least under great temptation to be indifferent.
I
think we have been well served in Hudson by councillors ... One can be the more sympathetic with people in these burdensome
offices when, as happens too often, an issue arises over which the councillors and the electorate are suddenly in confrontation,
and they are subjected to torrents of argument tinged with suspicion, derision, or downright hostility, and sometimes characterized
by plain ignorance of the facts.
At such times one may hear a bitter reference or two to the public's ignorance and
ingratitude. These however are the common lot of public office, and those who seek it have no reason to expect the rewards
of a universal popularity. On the other hand, it is their job to act in the interests of the electorate, and in the long run
it is the electorate alone who can judge how well this has been done. This does not always seem to be understood or accepted
in Hudson, and the verdict of the electorate is too often evaded or ignored, or sought if at all only under some compulsion
and with reluctance.
It is on matters to do with the future of this town that the Council has time and again got completely
out of touch with the wishes of the residents. Admittedly, it is a topic that arouses a great deal of anxiety, and anxiety
does not make for rationality. Yet the Council has always appeared to be taken by surprise by the storms aroused by its actions
in this area and seems in turn to have acquired its own neurotic anxiety, to avoid them by any available means. Correspondingly,
the Council's own position on the future has never been remarkable for its rationality.
It has repeatedly claimed
that its actions are governed by concern to preserve the 'semi-rural' character of the place. But what does semi-rural mean
to a Council that suddenly and covertly instals an urban system of lighting on all roads major and minor (except where the
electorate has gone out of its way to resist it), and seem to do nothing to prevent the deterioration of the town centre into
the standard North American small town commercial slum?
'Semi-rural' on the face of it means that at least half of
the area remains country, with fields and woods. But the Council's latest action is to urge the rezoning of two large portions
of land from agricultural to residential, without recommending any compensatory designation of land as agricultural to restore
the balance. There seems to be some belief that you can build houses all over a piece of land in such a way that it remains
semi-rural. This is not the definition of the term that is shared by the people who have been objecting. No matter how large
the lots, how posh the houses, and how winding the roads on it, that land has ceased to be rural in any sense when it is 'developed'
for residences. Fairhaven is not rural; it is not semi-rural; it is suburban in character, as we all know.
There is
another failure in rationality going about, the idea that we must be fair to those who own this agriculturally zoned land
and who counted on developing it. Apart from the question of being fair as well to those of us who had counted on the amenities
of Hudson being kept reasonably intact, there seems to be no question of depriving the owners of anything they have at the
moment. They lose nothing. A failure to rezone might 'deprive them' of something they had hoped to gain ...
It is
not the function of a Council to ensure that those who take such risks be rewarded. If everyone who owns such land is to be
ensured of making a gain from it, where is the risk? ...
The restoration of understanding between residents and the
people who ought to represent them - indeed the restoration of representation - is what I am anxious to see brought about
in November. It is quite wrong that so many able and experienced people in the community feel frustrated about its future.
One of the most regrettable features of the last few years was the suppression by Council of the active volunteer citizens'
committees on long-range planning, the dismantling of the structure that had so enterprisingly set them up, and their conversion
into the present Town Planning Commission. There was little future in that.
Yours
etc.
You'd think I was talking about Alstonvale. Twelve years later exactly the same points were still being made,
and the Town Council (under the same Mayor) had still done nothing at all about planning the future or meeting these arguments.
In a capitalist society the unseen, powerful engine that drives municipal politics is Real Estate Development, as I guess
we should have known.
(It is now as I write July 1990, and the dramatic events in Oka seem to draw the moral: the
one really successful way to stop the otherwise inexorable march of development, is to create a Warrior Society. The Residents
Association of Hudson should have recruited one, though perhaps not from its own ranks -)
The town centre:
3 to 2 against [31st July 1980]
Dear Sir,
The town centre has lost a great deal of character
in the last 20 years, but not to the extent that much of it cannot be recovered. An examination of the main visual features
of that area as it was recently defined by the Council has convinced me that the resolute application of two lines of policy
- one on parking places and the other on trees - can restore our town centre within the decade to a condition that both tradesmen
and residents can live with in comfort and pride.
At present, between Elm and McNaughton on Main Road, the number
of disfigured and disfiguring buildings exceeds the number of agreeable ones by a count of 31 to 24. If we add to the former
number those lots which once did hold a building but have since become parking lots, the ratio is 36 to 24, or 3 to 2. This
is clearly a very adverse balance in terms of the amenity which has usually attracted people to Hudson in the first place.
Of
those 31 disfigured or disfiguring buildings, 14 are potentially agreeable, being originally residential and not built for
the commercial purposes they now serve. The rest were and are out of tune with the original architecture of the place, though
one or two are not intrinsically phoney or disagreeable. All of the 31 are devoid of the setting that makes the other 24 (some
of them also commercial in function) agreeable and domestic - a setting of grass and shrubbery or trees extending to the road.
Each, whether originally residential or not, now stands bleakly in a barren plain of asphalt or gravel.
Now if those
14 buildings that were once part of the residential ambiance were to have restored to them the frontage setting of personally
tended greenery they once had, they would count on the other side of the ledger. It would then read 38 to 17 in favour of
the original appearance of Hudson, or over 2 to 1. A transformation, really. Those businesses would incidentally become appreciably
more attractive to new customers, as those which care for their front yards are already.
But what about their
parking, the reason for the destruction of front gardens? The answer to that must lie in adequate but municipally supplied
parking within 100 yards or so of every business in the town centre. It is encouraging to see the Council moving in this direction,
with a reduced size of centre, and a start made with an attractive parking lot at Selkirk and Main. We need one or two more
of these, possibly in existing lots (I nominate Lake Motors) so there may be much less reason for the almost universal desert
of asphalt that has taken over the town like the sands of the Sahara after a decade of drought.
This desert, by personal
count, now accounts for over half of the street frontage of our town centre, and is the main reason for it looking like the
standard North American truck stop. If nothing is effectively done about it - and admittedly there are difficulties - then
things will get worse. Cars, trucks and motorcycles now roam at will over the whole area, whereas for those on foot or bicycle
it is a tense and miserable place, to be avoided if possible.
Cars are killing Hudson's character while filling its
cash registers. They must be accommodated, but they must also be controlled. It may seem absurd to talk about establishing
parking lots in a town where no driver has any trouble finding a spot, but it is the only way to justify requiring businesses
to restore their frontages to greenery and decent sidewalks, where a mother may push her pram without fear, and a man may
in confidence walk his dog.
The second policy I advocate is easier to follow and simpler to describe. In
that same stretch of Main Road between Elm and McNaughton, there remain 54 trees of any size near the roadside. Against this
set the 30 utility poles and 13 other poles of various function. There are thus great gaps of denuded skyline against which
these poles become prominent, with all their tasteless tangle of rigging and line; and there are 27 stumps and dying trees,
not counting the relics asphalted over, to show what has never been replaced.
Town Hall's record on this is no credit
to it: words, but not action. It has connived at fellings, and at thefts of the trees planted by COPE. The two young trees
planted at the entrance to Manoir Cavagnal are both dead. A tree by the Town Hall is dying. All this can be changed easily
enough, but it needs resolution, for trees need persistent care in a hostile environment of asphalt and salt. A few shrubs,
marigolds and petunias set for one summer on a stone wall are nice but no substitute - consider the fate of the shopping centre's
erstwhile "garden".
It will take very little money and effort to make a lot of difference in a few years' time, but
there must be some resolve. Let us hope the Council can create it. One tree fills more of the eye than a pot of flowers. We
are grateful for the flowers, but let there be trees again.
Yours etc.
Criticism
is never welcome especially in a small town, and the standard line of defence to people like me (and there were many) was
the not unusual one that the people who had been around longer knew better. (What they really knew better was each other.)
But by this time I had turned 60 and had been around the world a bit, and this line of chat, from editorials in the Gazette
and from Town Hall, was beginning to pall.
Some finally patronising remark, by whom now forgotten, must have triggered
this one. Howie Putnam, perhaps, in his well-written column Council Corner, or Ron Jones, the wholly amiable Editor, whose
prose however was in itself a pleasantly Hudsonian curiosity. The education scene of the time was in its usual turmoil, drastically
aggravated by a precipitous fall in the school age population, and the Orwellian Ministry of Education of Quebec - gargantuan,
francophone, and remote - was an easy target for anglophone caricature.
"Local Age" [14th
August 1980]
Dear Sir,
After leaving the Council meeting the other night, I ran into an old acquaintance having
a drink, one of the whiz kids at the Ministry of Education. As you may know, I'm in that line of business myself. I told him
how the Councillors had been pretty upset because they were in the dark about what was being built up at the Mount Pleasant
school. His response surprised me.
"Ah, they have reason. That's going to be a pretty big job."
"How
come?" I said. "I thought you guys were closing everything down. Not enough kids."
"Oh, we've solved all that.
It's the New Solution - it was staring us in the face and we couldn't see it. Actually, it was your people in Hudson here
who had the answer all along."
"How do you mean?"
"Well, see, of course there are fewer and fewer
kids of 5 to 16 years old, what we've been calling School Age, right enough. But what we were hung up on was the idea that
'age' had to mean biological age, eh? - the number of years since you were born? But now we've adopted the concept of Local
Age. It's simple really."
"Local Age?"
"Yeah. Local Age is the number of years a person has been
in the locality he's in now. Like when your Mr. Bradbury or Mr. Jones tells someone she doesn't know what she's talking about
because she has only been in Hudson 10 years or something, while they've been here 28 or 50 or whatever, you know? It's brilliant
- "
"Well - yes. But - "
"So all we've had to do in the Ministry is make this minor change in the
definition, nothing else. All the legal structure's there already. Those people with a local age of less than 16 are gonna
have to go back to school. Do you realise what it means? It's fabulous! More buildings, all those teachers back at work,
big expansion in the Ministry, promotions. It's really going to set thing up great, for years to come."
"But you
can't do that!"
"Sure we can. We've done it - just waiting for the next session to confirm it. You've been doing
it in Hudson for years."
"But these people have all been to school already, university even. What are you going
to teach them?"
"Yeah, well that's called for some ingenuity, I can tell you. We're going to have to hire more
teachers of course, and they all have to have a sufficient local age themselves, so we're a bit limited in these times. We
tried to get your Mayor to do the Civics course but he's pretty busy. So we've hired a bunch of fellows to do it as a team
- "
And he mentioned a few names.
"But you can't use them! For Civics, yet! Those guys hang out at the
Chateau all the time, and go racketing around on motor bikes and cars, waking everybody up."
"I don't know anything
about that. They've all got a local age of over 20, so they're qualified to be teachers under the Act."
"But they
act like a bunch of kids. And you're going to have them teach all those people twice their age - the biggest age group here,
too, according to the Mayor."
He corrected me. " - Twice their age biologically, that's all. Half their local
age, remember, and that's what's in the Act."
A thought seemed to strike him. "So they act like kids, eh? That's
interesting. Is that why your town centre looks like a school playground, asphalt all round the buildings? Must make a great
track."
"Gee," I said, "I've just realised I've been in Hudson only 14 years. By your count, that puts me about
Grade 10, right?"
"Yeah, and you'd better watch it when you write those letters to the editor. Mr. Jones is going
to be your English teacher."
I paused, taking things in, gulping a bit. He got up to go.
"You
know," I said, "this is going to make a difference to those Council meetings on Monday nights. All those people with their
petitions won't be there. They'll all have homework to do."
"Except for one thing," he said, picking up his natty
brief case. "You forget the pre-schoolers. Under 5, the schools can't take them. Question time with the Mayor is going to
sound more like a kindergarten than ever. See ya!" Yours etc.
Odd,
but even verse
The following needs not only an explanation but also an abject apology - for
drawing it to anyone's attention. It was aimed at the St James Choir, to which I belonged for some years as a strictly journeyman
tenor. We had been rehearsing under Mike Ellis for the annual Christmas Service of Nine Lessons and Carols, and not for the
last time Mike had been trying to dissuade us from the usual sloppy diction when singing that all too familiar (and rather
sloppy) carol "Away in a Manger", with all its sliding notes that can drag ordinary syllables out to excruciating lengths.
But in vain. Tradition and nostalgia held their indomitable ground, and we continued to swoop and swoon all over the shop
whatever Mike did, omitting final consonants and breathing all wrong. So I thought it might be fun to let people see what
we sounded like, in print -
Chris Miss Karl [no date: unpublished]
(ritnbye junkie hah leh)
Ah weigh-in aha main je,
Noho cri fore ahbeh,
Thuhu lih till or cheese as layheh downiz
wee ted.
The stahzin thehe bryce guy
Luhooctown wary lay,
Thuhuh lih till or cheese erz ahaslee pon the hay.
I
like to feel that this is the version, promptly adopted with enthusiasm, that has been sung to this day.
The song
below is clearly nothing to do with Hudson, for who in Hudson would admit - as my friend in Knowlton Tony Stephenson freely
did - that all her acquaintances had but three things in common: widowhood (grass, golf, or otherwise), a desire to end that
lonely state as soon as possible, and a habit of playing tennis with a view to that end?
Maybe Knowlton is more sophisticated
than Hudson, its rival in English gentility, or more candid in its habits (being nearer the American border), or has a much
higher spousal casualty rate (suspicious, that); but I would bet a case of Scotch that you wouldn't find at the Royal Oak
Sunday tea even one among those sprightly ladies of mature years, in their immaculate tennis whites, to acknowledge that she
fitted the cheerful bill described by Tony - let alone the figure of seventy-one given by Tony. (As figures go, Tony's is
impeccable.)
Song for the Widows of Knowlton
(or for those of Royal Oak -) [no date: unpublished]
The 71 Widows of Knowlton
Are far from the meadows of Spring,
But the single
man coming to Knowlton
Will be handed his heart in a sling.
For the widows of
Knowlton play hardball -
Watch out for their backhanded volleys -
And they'll put all your
wits in a garble
Serving tea, with topspin, from their trolleys.
And whatever the ladies
have said, man,
Say nothing, and do nothing rash.
Try returning stuff over their heads, man
-
They'll put it away with a smash.
Yes, the widows of Knowlton want partners,
With
faults, whether double or none:
Love 15 - Love 30 - Love 40 -
(Play continues till Love 71).
The
coming of spring has many joys, much celebrated in literature and especially by the poets. But few of those poets have lived
in modern Quebec, with its own peculiar, and subtle, linguistic flourishes.
Cahots
[2nd April, 1987]
How pleasant in the spring to know
'Y a du danger des cahots,
And
watch poor unilingual clots
Collapse their cars on the cahots!
There was this surge
in real estate business in the years of 1986 to 1989, and many new houses were built in and around Hudson, besides the steady
boom in sales of existing houses. You got the feeling that living here had become a business deal of some kind, and that a
lot of your new neighbours were merely playing the market in posh properties, on this earth to make a profit out of wherever
they chose to live. For so much of what they did with their houses and lots seemed to be for show rather than for comfort.
This
of course translated in no time into apparent social ratings, and conspicuous consumption was what kept you up with the Joneses.
Boats in the harbour got huger and huger. If only they'd all known it, our own Hudson Joneses were anything but conspicuous
(at least in consumption; you could actually see Ron a mile off) and lived rather modestly. I thought I might try and put
people's ideas on social standing in the right Hudsonian perspective, having got fed up trying to hoe the tussocks out of
my rotting macadam -
[30th September 1987]
Dear Sir,
I
wonder if the Welcome Wagon would care to include the following song in the material to be dished out to newcomers in the
neighbourhood? I might even be persuaded, for a small fee, to supply a recording, accompanying myself on the social and cash
registers.
Grass in your Driveway: a Snob Song
You've financed this mansion
in Hudson
and you really like it here -
You love the boutiques and the gift shops
and
the country atmosphere.
You've joined both the Yacht and the Whitlock (your cruiser's sufficiently
long),
But - first check the grass in your driveway
to see if you do belong.
You've
landscaped the guts from the garden;
laid turf in a flat green floor;
A river of smooth black treacle
runs
right up to the smooth front door;
There are flowers in cute little barrels; but -
you
may just have got things wrong,
For if grass doesn't grow in your driveway, sir,
you simply don't
belong.
Just hang on around for twenty years
till your garage slews askew,
And the paint
flakes off the swimming pool fence,
and the dogs keep coming through,
And the wiring rusts in the
carriage lamps,
and the weeds in the lawn grow strong,
Till the grass grows at last in your driveway
-
Then you really shall belong!
Yours
etc.
I don't think the owners of Mullan's have ever forgiven me for the following little squibs, especially
the second one. They were proud of the fresh paint job they had just done, after a change of ownership within the family.
But I was by no means the only person in Hudson who was a bit shocked by the vivid sky-blue applied overnight to what was
already probably the most conspicuous historic building in the town - conspicuous both for its position confronting the foot
of the Côte and for its varied associations as a centre for the community. For it has served at different times as church,
post office, or school as well as general store.
People accordingly felt a personal affection for it, and still
do. But a dépanneur has to live, and they certainly drew attention with that paint job, having already been frustrated by
the Town over the electric sign they had tried out two years before - to which the first verse below had reacted. Perhaps
I wasn't the only person, however, who for a long time felt really reluctant to enter the place to buy anything.
[2nd
July 1986]
After Wordsworth
(rather a long way after, actually)
My heart sinks down when I behold
The sign
on Mullan's store:
I don't know quite why I should fret
(I haven't even read it yet)
The thing just leaves my cuspids
cold
And my eyes sore.
I wonder if they'll take a bet -
How many cars will fail to stop,
And end still goggling
half inside the shop?
.
A Ballad [25th September 1988]
Your
roof is red
Your walls are blue -
Dépanneur Mullan
Why should I love you?
Traffic
Since
I lived on the Côte I always had a lot to say about traffic, its noise and speed, so this letter touches on what was to become
a familiar theme. It also illustrates my habit of trying to be funny in earnest; I shall spare the present reader some of
the didactics. Curiously, the passage of the years has made no apparent difference to the awful habits of many bicyclists;
they oughtn't to survive, you'd think - but they do.
People on bikes [9th July 1973]
Dear
Sir,
Now that a few more people in Hudson have taken to bicycles for getting around - a lot better for the place
than the endless oafish cars - it is kind of amusing to observe that here again we have Canada uncertainly dithering at the
junction of two cultural points of view, the European and the American. In this case the question is which side of the road
you ride on; underlying this is the other one, of who or what you think you are when you are on a bike.
If you are
of the American persuasion you assume you are a kind of super-pedestrian and accordingly saunter along on the left, facing
(and baffling) the oncoming traffic in line with the best safety advice for foot passengers, using the sidewalks if they are
there and scaring the bejesus out of other forms of life thereon, and ignoring all traffic signs. (Pedestrians don't "Stop".)
If
you have the European conviction, your wheels make you as good as any damn car, you drive on the right making hand signals
and baffling the traffic behind you, forcing it to overtake (although you sneak past on the inside whenever it's stopped),
and also ignoring traffic signs (after all, you feel entitled to some advantages).
The confusion on the roads is pretty
to watch and distinctly useful for keeping cars down to a reasonable speed within the community ...
[I then went on
in rather prosy fashion to discuss the options and to recommend, of course, the one I grew up with, concluding thus-]
...
I suggest that bike riders adopt the right-hand side of the road before they are forced to observe a whole lot more rules
by the zealotry. And roll on that fuel crisis and the rationing of gasoline - especially for Mustangs and orange-coloured
cars, not forgetting the 2 a.m. racing fraternity. Yours etc.
Being
a former schoolmaster, I have often spent a number of hours at various times taking notes of how the traffic going past my
house was behaving, much to the irritation of those who observed me and who instantly suspected my intentions. So much so
that acquaintances began to get pretty self-conscious about their speeds passing my house. Or so I thought - until one summer
afternoon when I was working on my lawn and noticed the late Wally Wright going by at a very scrupulous pace. When he returned,
at the same pace, he saw me and stopped for a chat, and I told him by way of a compliment that he was the only driver I had
seen that day observing the speed limit. Well, he said, actually, he'd been looking for his missing hubcap.
Nevertheless,
it could be that my traffic counts and letters, of which the following is the first, had some obscure effect, for eventually
the police mounted quite a campaign on the Côte and gave it such a reputation that in the early 80's the hoarding at the top
end, welcoming people to Hudson, carried the graffito "TICKET CITY". That sign of youthful indignation pleased me a lot.
The
"rural" Côte [2nd September 1976]
Dear Sir,
Your would-be rival from the Lakeshore
[the News and Chronicle] calls Hudson "quiet, rural". You can have little to fear from them if this is their state of knowledge
of things hereabouts. What they need is one afternoon quietly rocking on my porch watching the steady stream of 200 horsepower
haywains roaring rurally by at 50 mph.
Any time I call the Hudson police I find instant and friendly co-operation.
But I sympathise with Pat McCoubrey's complaint, for the weekly lists of people fined for speeding are clearly making only
moderate impact on the actual behaviour of people driving, whether they are our so-called friends and neighbours, or visitors
to the municipality. It is probable that the job is more than the police can handle alone, for we are dealing with prevailing
tolerances and self-indulgences in the culture at large, and a merely local application of practices already ineffective elsewhere
is simply not going to be enough to make or keep Hudson an exception...
One dull and quiet afternoon in July I took
an hour and fifteen minutes off to count traffic on the Côte St Charles. It was a Thursday, between 5 and 6.30. Among other
things my figures show that of the 337 vehicles going by in that time 106 were clearly going too fast; that's 31%, a proportion
that remained much the same for each of the categories I was recording, except for motorcycles.
If it is objected
that a fellow sitting by the roadside can hardly judge speeds, I can only reply that I have practised it a bit, and find that
25 mph is distinctive as a leisurely pace for a vehicle. Anyone who seems at all in a hurry is certainly going over 30 (except
for certain very noisy trucks).
Now this makes three out of ten, or almost every third driver, a deliberate enemy
of those who live along this road. It may be that this is a proportion that represents fairly enough the number of people,
in society at large, who characteristically fail to exercise self-restraint on any principle - who are equally likely to break
any other law or obligation if it suits them and if they can get away with it, who create the climate in which corruption
flourishes, and so on. It is a plausible figure, and may even be a bit low. Certainly, my impression is that as summer has
gone on the proportion has got higher on the Hudson roads.
How can one police car cope with the task of changing
society? All the same, the police might keep plugging. The thing is that speed means noise as well as some danger; and we
might at least be quiet, if we can no longer be rural, with all these brilliantly lit race-tracks leading through and out
of town. There seems to be an increasing number of older cars driven by younger people with quite deliberately angry exhausts
(the cars, I mean), and there is in particular one veritable machine-gun on two wheels that has been affronting the community
again and again, usually very late at night, for over two years now with apparent immunity. I cannot understand, if car drivers
can be rightly penalised for squealing their tires, why this very offensive weapon of contempt for the public turns up so
often to startle everyone out of sleep. It can be heard literally over a mile away.
Perhaps the police need encouragement.
But not pats on the back yet, and they could do with some support from the people who like Hudson the way it was but will
do nothing serious, privately or publicly, to prevent it sliding into the Lakeshore. Yours etc.
I
don't remember when exactly all our signs went metric, but of course when they did it gave all drivers yet another excuse,
as if they felt they needed any, for ignoring them with sightless eyes.
I used to look after the roses in St James
churchyard, and it was when driving there with my various garden tools and smelly repellants that I made the Discovery described
below. (Of course this was in those dark days before all enlightened people had become sensitive to, and protective of, the
right to life of mildew and earwigs.)
My own invention [10th August 1978]
Dear Sir,
It
has long been my wish to do something to help my fellow citizens of Hudson as they struggle with what is clearly one of the
most perplexing problems of the day, and I am now happy to report a Discovery, simple but far-reaching in its implications,
that may be of some service to that end.
Every day, sir, I see my good neighbours pass by along the Côte Road deep
in the problem of what speed to travel at. As their eager cars strain at the leash, the drivers' brows can be seen to be knitted
in earnest mental strife. For they are wrestling not only with the mathematics of 40 km/h = x mph, but also with the ethics
of the allowable difference (d) between the permitted speed (x) and the actual speed (y), or
d > (x-y) = bad boy
There
is still a further complication in this intricate intellectual puzzle that suggests that it will remain forever unresolved,
and that is the calculation of the probability (P) that the cops (c) are just over the hill (h), which leaves us with
y
> x = $50 fine (as P c / h approaches 1)
It is small wonder that this vexed tangle of imponderables is rarely
resolved before the driver has reached Highway 17 [now 342] and the safety of a higher speed limit. And of course the chances
of its being solved are even further reduced if there are kids in the back seat, a blonde in the front seat, or - if you are
the blonde - you have just remembered that the oven's still on.
Like many of the major Discoveries that have blessed
mankind, mine came to me accidentally and in a moment of attention to other matters. I had occasion recently to carry on the
floor of my car a bottle containing a noxious watery mixture of a horticultural character, purporting to be repellant to insects
at the very least. This bottle had a leaky top. I was naturally concerned that it should not spill and leave a permanent record
in the car carpet. Fortunately it was only half full, and as I anxiously adjusted the motion of the car to the threat of the
spill, negotiating the bumps in the road, the corners, and the various potentials for a sudden stop, I had occasion to glance
at my speedometer.
Could it be so? I checked again, and again. It was true! I was going at exactly 24.855 mph, which
as every government computer knows is the equivalent of 40 km/h.
Let me therefore outline the clear implications.
Every car travelling in Hudson should contain on the floor beside the driver's feet an open bottle, loose, half-full of some
appropriate liquid. By that is meant something whose intimate presence in the carpet would hardly be desired - say sour milk,
or the personal juices of dead lobster or crab (I speak from experience), or stale, flat, and unprofitable pepsicola.
The
presence of such a bottle, unspilled, will be accepted by the constabulary as sufficient guarantee, upon any casual spot check,
that the car concerned has been, is, and will continue to be observant of the lawful speeds. Hudson will once again have happy
carefree drivers, no longer hagridden and distracted from their true courses by mental conundrums, though perhaps a trifle
worried about their socks.
Of course, such a bylaw could hardly apply to motorcycles. But there is an equally simple
solution for them. Station your policemen in disguise at strategic roadside spots, each equipped with a baby sleeping in a
pram. Any motorcyclist disturbing the baby's sleep at a distance of 10 feet is either going too fast, or should not have bought
his machine in the first place. Yours etc.
The following
letter was written two years later, after several more sessions in my driveway, the speeding not having abated (curiously
enough) and the police not yet having done anything effective. But the statistics apart - the numbers now would be much greater
- I could as easily have written it today, for as the number of small corpses on the roads testifies we are back to Square
One around here as far as driving habits are concerned.
The only thing apparently holding back any visitors
on the Côte and on Main is the decorum of those local drivers in front of them who do indeed care about their neighbours'
welfare and the amenity of the town. Outsiders, up for speeding at the municipal court, now at last outnumber locals by a
considerable margin.
Self-policing for cars [18th September 1980]
Dear Sir,
The
evidence that drivers around Hudson are policing themselves is less and less overwhelming. They are in fact massively indifferent
to the persistent efforts of our tiny police force.
By sitting out in my driveway with a tally sheet for 2 hours at
a time, at different hours of the day during late July and early August, I have compiled a count for a representative weekday
between 8 am and 6 pm of the kinds of traffic that pass by on the Côte. On the average day during those hours (which exclude
the nonsense that goes on every evening and the mass turmoil of the weekends) about 2,000 vehicles go by. Of these over half
(54% in fact), or more than 1,000, were clearly exceeding the speed limit by a wide margin. 53 of them were deliberately racing,
at about 50 mph or more.
I am well aware of the imprecisions involved in judging speed with the naked eye. A driver
sticking to 40 km/h or 24 mph, however, must go almost unnaturally slowly, at a deliberately leisured pace which is easily
recognisable. Many who are conscientious about their speed will still go over by a few miles per hour from time to time.
It
was nevertheless relatively easy to distinguish those who are at least trying, even somewhat casually, from those who do nothing
serious about it (although they may realise there is some sort of limit, for they do not give it the gas). The dividing line
is somewhere about 33 mph, or 15 km/h over the limit - and as I tallied I reminded myself constantly to give the benefit of
the doubt to vehicles that appeared to be travelling about that speed.
Most, however, gave me no problems at all.
It has become habitual for road users in Hudson to travel the Côte at between 35 and 40 mph [60 to 70 km/h]. Indeed they have
come to expect it as a right, and get indignant if held up by more thoughtful drivers.
Are these speeds dangerous
as well as illegal? Of course they are. On the narrow single lanes of our roads, with no pathways on the edges, we are incredibly
lucky to have had no fatalities around here in recent years. It was at 35 mph (then a legal speed) - or so he said - that
a young man was traveling down the Côte a few years ago when he came over the blind brow of the hill and struck our car as
my wife was turning it into our driveway. Another yard or so to the right, or a fraction of a second earlier, and my youngest
son would have been killed in the passenger seat - for after striking our car this 'moderate speeder' traveled for 30 yards
into the ditch across the road.
Numbers like these, traveling at such speeds, create a climate in which more and more
risks are taken. The percentage of arrogant drivers who threaten everyone else seems to have risen. Faced with a cyclist ahead
of them and an oncoming car, just as many drivers will now accelerate, to brush by, as will wait for the road to be clear.
When, next week or next year, there is added to the hundreds of small animals and family pets killed in Hudson one
or more of the joggers, children on bikes, mothers with prams, or commuters going home from the train after dark, the guilt
for their deaths will have to be shared by that half of the men and women who now drive about Hudson indulging themselves
whenever the police are not right there.
Yours etc.
I furnished the
police with those statistics, and though I expect they mystified the Chief a good deal, being presented in an amateurish fashion,
they did seem to help the Police Committee to decide to mount a quite thorough campaign of checking speeds, with the gratifying
effect on Hudson's reputation for traffic tickets mentioned above. We could do with another.
But the youth of Hudson
continued to walk along the roads as though, like certain legendary saints, they were exempt from all natural laws (perhaps
they are). But at night, street lights or no, I have time and again discovered at the last second someone in the rain about
ten feet in front of me at the edge of the road, his back toward me, dressed in protective camouflage, sublimely confident
that he is as fully visible in the light of my headlights and those of the oncoming car that I am trying to avoid, as he would
be against a snowbank in the broad light of noon.
Maybe they were ghosts. If not, they soon would be.
People
on foot [18th March 1987]
Dear Sir,
May I address through your columns some words of
sage advice and warning to those who have the temerity to walk upon the motor roads of this town. These include the young
and licenceless, wandering off from school homewards or to Mullan's as if the entire landscape were free, and also the health
nuts of all ages except the young, who don't have to be nuts to be healthy. I shall not attempt to address the dogs. Any Hudson
dogs who read the Gazette, it is all too clear, pay no attention to anything anyone says there anyway.
A letter in
your columns a few weeks ago complained very properly about having to adjust the steering wheel to avoid pedestrians in the
road. The writer was perfectly right. The road is for cars, and pedestrians - if they simply have to go about outdoors - should
use the ditch provided. What was more aggravating, the writer went on to say - several of these pedestrians were in the habit
of walking three abreast, rendering quite intolerable the detour she had to make from her car's right of way. Car drivers
should not have to give their attention to such details, especially when their radio is playing classical music.
Now
it will be claimed by those ignorant youths who are guilty of this practice that they like to talk to each other as they go
to get their goodies at recess, and that the ditch and all that are not wide enough for company. I must be patient and point
out that the privilege of keeping company only applies to people who sit in cars, and that if they were to sit 3, 5, or 7
abreast in the car their parents might provide they could then talk with each other till they were blue in the face - which
would not be long - in confidence that they had the full support of decent society.
And if they should ask, in that
insolent manner young people adopt when they are probably right, "What's the difference?"; then I, still being very patient,
would have to point out that they have overlooked the fact that their parents pay all those taxes so that the roads will be
built and salted and swept for the unrestricted passage of all sorts of vehicles that nobody invited to come, and not for
anything that their mere children might want to do.
And if the kids then say why should their parents spend their
money on other people and not us, that's nuts - then I'd have to tell them sharply to go talk to your father, or mother, whichever
isn't around at the time, of course. The point is, roads are for cars and trucks. Cars and trucks may stand about on sidewalks,
but people may not stand about on roads. That's that, and no arguing.
But here's a tip for the recalcitrants. When
you do walk along a road, as of course you will continue to do since you have learned at school to pay no serious attention
to talking adults, you'll have a longer and less painful life if you can see what's coming toward you. So, fatheads, walk
on the LEFT. This way you will be able to watch the car that comes at you out of control before it wipes you out; or you may
study the truck that's about to knock off the top of your skull with its side mirror; and so you will get that immense thrill
you expected out of life just as you leave it.
Better yet, you will be able to push your friend or friends at just
the exact moment into the truck's path, instead of leaving it to chance as you do now, walking on the right and never knowing
what's coming up behind you. And of course, if you're on the left facing the traffic, should you really want to get home for
supper you could always frustrate your killer by diving into that thoughtfully provided ditch, realising with gratitude that
the Town Council has after all done something for you with that tax money.
There's another thing. You may think, walking
along after dark, that because a car has its headlights on, it can see you. The reverse is true. You can see it because it
has headlights, but it can't see you because you don't. You're as black out there as your young resentful heart, all except
that pale, washed-out winter face of yours, which will actually reflect light like the underside of a fish. So point that
moony thing toward the cars, not away from them. Walk on the left unless you want to die an undistinguished death among the
roadside garbage.
Of course if you were born with your face a good dark colour, or if you have just been to the West
Indies to get one, better wear dayglow on your chest at all times and look like a road sign. Drivers always pay so much attention
to them.
And when the snowbanks disappear in the spring, remember that your last hope of being visible like a dark
smudge against them will have gone. Then it's the bottom of the pit out there at night (not that the cars will go any slower)
and unless you prowl along the edges like a cat or look like a walking Christmas tree, you're going to end up just another
kind of smudge, and they're going to have to spend more taxes cleaning the road yet again. So your parents will really be
annoyed. We can't have that.
Yours etc.
I thought this might have educational
value, so I sent a copy off to Don Barnes, the Principal of the High School, who is a good egg. Can't understand why he wouldn't
use it.
Garrulities
In 1984 I retired, and
garrulity began - although there was a hiatus almost at once, spent in Scotland until I came to my senses and returned in
1985. I wrote this letter just before I left.
Ochone! for Hudson Hardware [6th October 1984]
Dear
Sir,
I am very concerned. Is Hudson about to let a part of its essential being sink into the sands of time - as represented
by the ditch alongside Yacht Club Road - without another word? A week has gone by, and no one has responded to the devastating
news of September 20th under your heading of "New Store for Hudson Hardware".
Whatever the Town Planning specifications
may be, once the present structure (if that is the right word) is interfered with, a unique and necessary feature of the community
will have disappeared. As the nearest thing in the architectural history of Hudson to an old cardboard box, it is a focus
of community interest that simply cannot be replaced. Where else in Canada can any ordinary customer go through, as often
as he or she pleases, the unique experience of acquiring more or less necessary goods in quite this way? This is a privilege
without price - well, without very predictable price, anyway.
You park in front, keeping your engine quiet (the fewer
vibrations the better). You clamber across those unusual cement ravines to enter the cavern through its uniquely flapping
portal, and then to the tune of massed crockery spontaneously jingling to your tread, approach down the narrow aisle to meet
in its inmost depths the assorted trolls, elves, and other troglodytes who wait to test you with riddles. "Oh, so that's what
you want? Never heard of it."
Where else, when the transaction is done, do your change and your purchase roll conveniently
towards you down the specially designed counter? And I know of no other hardware store where your can of paint is mixed for
you as you wait by having the building shake while the machine stands still.
With respect, sir, your other admirable
report did contain one or two minor points on which I disagree. How could a new store possibly be "more attractive in appearance"
when the present one, with each inch of its decline, settles more harmoniously into its environment? As for some (no doubt
frivolous) women finding the present store unattractive, surely this is hardly the point. It is not the store but the company
in the store, that strangely cheering life among the gnomes and the hobbits and the almost straight faces and the unique indoor
weather system, that makes you happy to go out with something you had never intended to buy, and whose charm no clinic of
glass and chrome, triple the size, with doors that actually fit, can ever hope to match.
For after all, Mr. Editor,
every community needs some easily recognisable target that everyone may agree happily to deplore. What are we going to talk
about when the Hardware's gone? (The Town Council had better watch out.)
Yours in despair,
etc.
The amazing thing is that the original tin shack of Hudson Hardware
still lurks like an old crone by the Yacht Club Road, jeering at the gentry on their way to Happy Hour and mumbling to herself
of former glory. How many tons of discarded nails still lie there, and of broken glass, crunched into the floorboards; and
how many forgotten, démodé chamber pots lie crouched in dust under its eaves - who knows?
It was all supposed to
come down when the new Do-It airplane hangar (disappointing that it has never been put to that use) was erected on the Poirier
parking lot. That it hasn't done so is a testimony to the stubbornness of an ancient feud between the Crombies and the Councillors
that goes back into the mists of time and that accounted, at the time of the writing of the letter above, for an unprecedented
state of ruin in the roadway in front of the Store, that may have prompted Jack to announce his move.
At all events,
the same instinct for the safe-guarding of arcane knowledge still pervades the new establishment, for all its air of hi-tech
efficiency. Whatever you think you want when you enter is still camouflaged behind an amazing mass and variety of what you
don't; the help you invariably have to go look for is equally elusive, flitting like bats in the twilight from aisle to aisle
and seen only out of the corner of your eye; and when you finally run one of these ambient spirits to the ground, your request
is treated with a totally disarming friendliness combined with the blank finality of fate. Macbeth had a relatively easy time
of it with the witches.
The Hudson Players Club has had a long-standing tradition (at least three years old)
of assembling by candlelight in some cosy hall shortly before Christmas and being read to by various of its members, while
they all get nostalgic for the Dickensian or Edwardian childhoods that the readings tend to reflect. (Dickensian and Edwardian
people are two-a-penny in Hudson, even if they drive BMWs and have spent their entire childhoods in Milton Keynes.)
As
the mulled wine and the plum cake circulate through the hall and the digestive systems therein, warm fruity fumes arise and
the nostalgia gets headier. It was in conditions like these that I read the following letter, in 1986, having been prevailed
upon by the organizer of the event to write "one of your letters to the Editor". To appreciate the timing, however, the present
reader must visualise listeners who had already negotiated months of worsening weather amid the usual tedious and commercially
generated anticipations of "Merry Yule", and who therefore were quite ready for the studied impudence of the ideas I now put
to them as they downed their third glass.
Rethinking Christmas [12th December
1986]
to the Editor of almost anything
Dear Sir,
I
am sure there must be many who share my conviction that the Christmas season is far too long. The stores began it all months
ago, as early as October. Many people have had their lights up for weeks. Plays and pantomimes have come and gone, the season
of Bazaars, parties and concerts has all but passed its peak, and surely everyone by now, especially mothers, have just about
had their fill. Why then do the churches, never up with the times, insist on dragging the whole thing out yet another two
weeks, by setting services and so on as late as the 25th of December? Great Heavens, that's almost the end of the year, with
New Year's Day still to think about.
You begin to understand why churches are in such trouble with their attendance.
I mean, naturally they have some traditions to consider, but they seem lamentably short of ordinary marketing sense. One
gathers there has been much talk of reform in these institutions in recent years, and much preoccupation with modernising
the language they use, so as to reach those people who can manage to follow a radio or TV commercial. I believe the correct
term is outreach (or is it overreach?). But there does seem to be lacking the kind of bold, innovative concept-chopping that
mere businessmen recognise to be necessary for survival in an age of change.
If churches are to get ahead, let them
get ahead of the competition by rethinking the date of Christmas. What's so sacred about the 25th of December? Who needs the
Twelve Days of Christmas when you've already had twelve weeks of it? It is a regrettable sign of their lack of a necessary
flexibility in the arts of survival that the churches have been stuck with this date for centuries, even though it was of
course quite arbitrarily chosen in the first place.
My considered recommendation is that the date of Christmas
be reset for the first Tuesday after Labour Day. There are innumerable advantages to this proposal.
Labour Day comes
at a time when everybody is bored with summer. This simple transfer of Christmas, to the day after, would transform the dog
days of late August into a time of excited anticipation. At a notoriously bad time of year for retailers it would really
fill the stores. The shoppers would have dry roads, free of snow, ice and slush, and would stroll through air-conditioned
plazas unhampered by stifling parkas, gloves, scarves, woollen tuques, clumsy overshoes, and baggy underwear. I do go on and
on - I mean, I could go on and on. And remember, as soon as the festival is over, the very next day, off go all the brats
and layabouts to their schools and colleges, solving at one blow the single most demoralizing problem of the family Christmas
- what to do with everybody till New Year's Day.
But what, people will cry, about all the dear familiar trappings?
What will carols be like, and the turkey dinner, without snow on the ground and cosy firelight within? A moment's thought
reminds us that most people in the world do happily without these things - even if they are rather simple-minded thikkies
like Australians who seem pretty easy to please. Let us be positive. The Labour Day weekend must be about the only holiday
of the year that is not at present marked by overeating. It would now receive, at last, its own gastronomic hallmark. And
as for carols, if one can rewrite the litany and the Bible, one can surely fix them up.
Let me offer an example.
The quintessential carol of carols is probably "O Come all ye faithful" - yet it is full of exactly the kind of language the
ecclesiastical reformers so wisely consider unacceptable, in the light of contemporary mores. Just think of the harmful effect
of the very first line, with its exclusive invitation to the "faithful" only. Do you call that "outreach"?
Then there
follow words like "adore", "behold", and "joyful and triumphant". These words are not only archaic, but they also reflect
outdated and therefore of course irrelevant value systems. And should we not translate into contemporary concepts such terms
as "King of Angels" and "Lord" and even "Bethlehem" (the connection with the steel industry is really quite obscure)?
In
the version I now propose to sing to you [Yes, I sang it] in order to demonstrate the immediate improvement in communication
that translation brings about, I have interpreted these difficult concepts rather freely, guided only by the tested practices
of social science.
(Admittedly it has resulted in the scansion for some of the lines being not all that it might
be. But what do such minor blemishes in style matter, if one approaches with the right spirit?)
O Come, all you persons,
In
great satisfaction,
O Come now, O come to the
Maternity Ward.
Come, and observe him,
Born
in the 100th percentile!
O Share affective responses to,
O Share affective responses to,
O Share affective responses
to,
Christ, the resource person!
I rest my case. Yours etc.
I must have
been in an exceptionally good mood when I wrote this next one. The theme of noise-making by one's near neighbours is guaranteed
to arouse baleful and unneighbourly feelings in the mildest of breasts, and I have been no exception. It could only be mitigated
by the fact - that I always had to remind myself of, suppressing emotion by the exercise of reason in the best academic tradition
- that any neighbours I have got to know have invariably turned out to be very nice people.
Never on Sundays [3rd
May 1987]
Dear Sir,
For some time now it's been apparent that the assiduous
efforts of our ever-enterprising ladies in real estate are paying off - if that's the expression I'm looking for. There are
notices For Sale and little arrows sprouting at every corner; our Main Road on weekends brings to mind St Catherine Street
on weekdays; one seems to meet nothing but strange faces, except behind counters in the stores; cars park at all angles in
front of the Post Offices; the Sunday air throbs with the sound of many lawn mowers. People by their hundreds have evidently
moved out to Hudson to share in its peace and quiet.
Well, that's fine. There's room. Except that, when I think of
it, all the room left has those little notices posted on it. Well, God bless Royal Le Page.
Mornings in Hudson, once
summer comes, are full of bird song and the purposeful tread of ladies in bright orange shorts, with rakes and trowels in
their hands instead of brooms. Nature needs tidying. But at least it's quiet work, and orange shorts aside, serenity reigns.
Just wait till the chaps come home. Days spent in the office with collar and tie bode ill for the Great Outdoors. When release
finally comes, Someone's going to go right out and do something to the Great Outdoors, vigorously and in manly style. And
watch out for your ears.
There's something in the male ego that longs for the conspicuous deployment of power. It
would rather use a power saw than a hand saw, even if it takes longer to set up and calls for much less display of muscle.
It sounds stronger. The moment chaps come home on a fine still summer evening, they go outside, take a deep breath of sweet
country air, and then light into their houses or trees or gardens with the nearest available power tool. In no time the air
is surging and vibrating with several layers of machined noise, from sixteen locations in the nearer neighbourhood. I don't
know what happens to the birds. I suppose they just shut up, stupefied and abashed. To judge by the way the crows are conversing
these mornings, some of them go deaf. But the men seem happy. They trudge round obliviously for hours behind (or on) their
bellowing monsters, wiping out the day.
It's an awesome thought that during this summer every single blade of grass
in Hudson - there must be trillions of them - is going to get clipped over the head once a week for months to keep it from
growing. And it will take that entire army of expensively educated and salaried men, equipped with a panzer corps of machines
driven by a lake of fuel, to do it. Amazing.
But the real estate ladies do say it's a restful place.
The place
is actually full of dynamic activity, exhausting to contemplate. Everywhere you look, houses are getting beaten up, the more
radically the better: rip out that wall, gut that basement, tear out the swimming pool and build another one. Show what you
can do to those things, and to your garden too. Leave your mark on the place. It's a great feeling, I know - done it myself.
But "When? " - as during the war a Polish officer once bemusedly asked, of those Scottish ladies who went around all day with
their hair in curlers - "When is the hour of beauty?" Well, later perhaps. In August, say, when the men have all gone away
to take a holiday, exhausted from being at home.
There was a saying once firmly adhered to in Hudson, because so ably
fostered by a lady who wrote a weekly column for your paper: "Never on Sundays". It meant that everyone avoided, if they
possibly could, using mowers and other noise-makers on that one day of the week, so that everyone could enjoy some of that
elusive peace and quiet. I suppose in a way the saying still applies, in a rather different sense. After all, there's an understandable
inclination for the fellows to sail, golf - do anything on a Saturday but the jobs around the house. So, I guess, "never on
Sundays" will we hear birds singing.
One or two of those birds, of course, can be real boring to listen to. But I've
yet to hear a machine that sounded even tolerable after the first minute - except, of course, my own one.
Yours
etc.
Some of my best friends are real estate ladies. And I don't think they were terribly pleased with
this next one, for while they themselves were not notably guilty of blatantly thrusting their For Sale signs on the attention
of every passerby, some of their colleagues were. And certainly some of their competition were, at a time when the market
was so active that new companies were starting up everywhere, like hideous mushrooms in some pantomime transformation scene.
I was not, however, the only person to take exception, for I later heard that Mayor Bradbury had already been writing chilly
letters to the real estate firms reminding them of the town's bylaws. So things soon became better.
But not for very
long. Business has fallen off, but (or therefore) the signs of one outfit in particular at the time of writing are more conspicuous
than ever - nagging the eye, as they are fully intended to do, with their crude colours on every green and pleasant street
in Hudson.
Signs, everywhere [24th March 1988]
Dear Sir,
This
letter is about signs (but it's not about any of those imaginary linguistic grievances that that other Gazette goes on about).
I think we have a sight too many signs already, and now we're getting a whole lot more.
A sign is a device put up
by someone who wants my attention for something I would otherwise ignore. It is designed to intrude - and it is a question,
deserving legal scrutiny, what right anyone has to use a public space for this purpose. Yet what we now have is probably just
the beginning of a rapid proliferation of these tasteless objects, not only along the roadsides of our region, but within
Hudson itself.
Few who ride about in these parts can have failed to notice an acceleration in the visual pollution
of our scenery in the last few weeks. Not only are there these yellow hoardings along the Trans Canada - in locations that
I had always understood to be illegal - portraying a comic chicken, improbably canonized under the name of Hubert. But at
other such sites, billboards in disagreeable colours are multiplying like weeds. These are additional to the extraordinary
clutter of superfluous directional and monitory notices, churned out by what has become a runaway traffic-sign industry, presumably
located somewhere in Quebec and presumably indulged by government. (And of course the more of them, the less attention anyone
pays.)
Counting the frequency of these signs is one way of putting one's irritation to use. As you come into Hudson
by what used to be its most attractive entry, in the first kilometre from the turn onto Cameron there are now no fewer than
24 unpleasant little placards clamouring for your attention - not counting the names of streets, which are useful, or the
one really necessary sign announcing the Mother and Father of all Cahots, a sign which of course had fallen down on the day
I did this count.
This display of calculated litter includes a confused medley of warning signs for the bend at the
top, the older black and yellow arrows simply having been left there when a number of new red and white ones replaced them.
And a good half of the welcome is made up of gaudy signs and arrows put up by the hucksters of real estate, as if the whole
point of living here were to sell your house for a profit.
We can surely do something more about these things within
Hudson, having made a commendable start with shops. The Council could begin by removing superfluous traffic signs (such as
those for unreal children crossing roads where no child has ever been seen to cross) and resisting purchase of the new ones
being peddled by the industry.
It could also act against the excessive competitive enthusiasm of certain real estate
agents, who intrude on the rest of us with their petty wars, and are responsible for the pustular excrescences sprouting wherever
you look along our streets. They have taken to putting up more than one For Sale sign on the same property (we have locally
had three from the same woman on a previously pleasing woodlot) and leaving those offensive arrows permanently at every street
corner. Many of these signs are on town property. If the town won't remove them, I don't see why public-spirited citizens
shouldn't kick them flat (accidentally of course). Even when a For Sale sign has served its legitimate purpose it is no longer
taken away, but is left up indefinitely to brag "Vendu", in dayglow letters. That word was not long ago a term of abuse; are
these agents now applying it to themselves?
These things and the motives behind them spoil one's pleasure in the precincts
of Hudson. I suppose some people might think of the signs, in our bleak winter landscapes, as a sort of sign of life - as
mouse droppings might be said to be. But it's a form of life most of us are not really anxious to know about. Yours
etc.
A now rather too familiar phenomenon in Hudson's verbal life began to emerge in the late 80's,
in the form of a fairly sustained barrage of stuff about the appalling danger to everyone, especially children, dogs, cats
and any other creatures that weren't in a position to write their own letters in repudiation, of 'chemicals' - no matter where
and how applied.
Deploying the once discredited, but still effective, propaganda technique of the water torture,
in which it didn't matter much how or what you said so long as you kept on saying it until people were ready to scream, the
particular writer of the letters to which this one of mine was a reply had maintained that the burning of leaves was especially
heinous because it spread a presumably deadly smoke from all that "chemically sprayed debris". (Quite how the leaves from
our rather tall trees should manage to get sprayed by anyone, or why, was not suggested.)
Chemically sprayed
people [24th April 1988]
Dear Sir,
After
reading that very disturbing letter last week, which drew our attention to the terrifying dangers of smoke from chemically-sprayed
debris in our town, I began to worry about the considerable number of older people living here. Given that the ecology has
been collapsing all round us for some decades, and that we are all inevitably part of it, these older people are all survivors
of what we are often assured has been a major disaster. And yet the proportion of people over 60 in the present population,
at least in Hudson, is relatively high.
What explains this? If they are like me they have throughout their lives been
repeatedly immersed in chlorinated water, have swallowed innumerable chemicals in their food and drink, have breathed deeply
of all the fumes of modern life, are constantly - if like me - ingesting medication, and have frequently doused themselves
if not in hairsprays then in OFF. We must all be unusually lucky to have lived so long.
So if I follow [the correspondent
of the previous week] - which isn't all that easy - all us retired types here are chemically-sprayed debris, especially if
we use Dristan. And we had better not smoke, especially between April 15th and May 15th?
I hope I've got all this
right -
Yours etc.
I include the following rather didactic piece because of
its continuing, indeed increasing relevance as the town's population swells with many newcomers, whose neighbourly relations
in some cases seem confined to their experiences in the impersonality of apartment buildings in cities, and are conducted
in the dog-eat-dog manner celebrated in the contemporary media.
Or, as a recent incident has suggested, in a woman-love-dog-eat-woman
manner: the people in a certain neighbourhood had the owner of a dog denounced for cruelty before the Council, only to discover,
had they even spoken to her first, that the dog was indeed in excellent health and well cared for, as the SPCA subsequently
avouched. There has been an epidemic of this sort of unlovable behaviour, to some extent provoked by fussy Bylaws that are
only really enforceable if neighbours report each other to the police. The amazing thing is that they do denounce each other
- saintly do-gooders in particular. It would have been inconceivable in that former Hudson, whose reputation probably attracted
them here in the first place.
What to do about a noisy party [16th June 1988]
Dear Sir,
I
am reported in your coverage of last week's Council meeting as having written a letter "complaining about noisy parties" -
upon receiving which all the Councillors present appear to have nodded their heads sympathetically and left it at that. I
have however had since a fuller reply from the Mayor, to whom I had addressed the letter, deploring the younger generation
and referring to the Nuisance Bylaw as the only recourse upon which the police may act.
Now I am not in the habit
of writing letters just to "complain". Well, all right, I do usually write out of irritation, but I do also try to turn the
heat thus engendered in me into useful channels, as energy. I had made in that letter certain concrete suggestions to the
Mayor and Council for what seemed to me feasible and productive action, namely to provide citizens with the information and
advice that they need whenever, throughout some long hot summer afternoon and evening, they have been subjected to extreme,
prolonged, quasi-musical aggression, and have rapidly grown bonkers or angry or both. Of course, the Councillors may have
been nodding for some other reason, given the length of the agenda that night, but mere sympathy was not what I was looking
for.
I believe most of us these days find ourselves more and more often in the extraordinary, frustrating quandary
I have described, and compelled, without notice and under stress, to ask oneself these questions: Is making such a racket
in fact illegal? Should one call those people up (who are they, for that matter?) or call the police? What can or will the
police do about it? Where does one draw the line between happy noises and offensive rowdiness? Is there - a totally misleading
idea, it turns out - some kind of time limit in the evening to official indulgence of noise in this town?
Chagrined
at the non-upshot (downshot?) of my letter to the Council, I went to the Town Hall today and asked for a copy of the Nuisance
Bylaw. Asking like this for a copy fortunately does not constitute a nuisance under the many meanings of this by now quite
comprehensive Bylaw, for which fines up to $300 may be imposed - and failing payment, imprisonment up to 2 months (which only
takes us up to the middle of August, regrettably).
So in answer to some of my own questions may I report to you that
first of all, yes, there is no question that noise is illegal. The Bylaw declares as a nuisance, among other things, the "Production
of noise or sound, harmonious or not, which is excessive or unusual to the extent that it will disturb the peace and tranquillity
of the neighbourhood."
This definition is unconditional, unlike the next one. That definition refers to the "operation
of any musical instrument or any system for the ... amplification of sound ... in such a manner as to interfere with the
well being, comfort and repose of the persons residing in the vicinity." Good enough, but this designation as nuisance will
"not apply to public meetings or places of amusement authorized by the Council".
And there is no indulgence whatever
as to time. The only such clause prohibits between 10 pm and 7 am the carrying out of construction and repair work except
as approved by Council or for public service.
May I add to this (condensed) information some of the advice I looked
for? The Mayor wrote to me that "the police should be called when the noise level is beyond norms". That is precise and definite.
However, I believe that goodwill and neighbourly courtesy require that you do first call the offending household, to point
out that people are being upset. If this appeal is then ignored, or yielded to only temporarily or inadequately, then you
have solid ground to call our police, who are understandably much more ready to help those who first help themselves in this
way.
And call the offenders early on. Don't wait for others perhaps closer to the scene to call in for you. For it
will do no harm at all if the offenders receive calls from more than one of their neighbours - and the further away the caller
the more impressive the call. Waiting to call until the strain breaks you down only gives the party types the argument that
"no one else has been complaining all this time, so why you?”...
Of course, with all respect, Mr. Editor,
the people who have the arrogance to inflict on an entire neighbourhood their personal idea of having a good time are unlikely
to read these columns. You sometimes wonder if they read anything, except the titles on their cassettes - a complete sentence
might be too much. Most people however are interested in the Town's reports on how their tax money is spent. And I regret
that the Council did not see fit to publish something in such a report so as to reach that wider audience on this topic. Yours
etc.
'In Enterprise of Theatre'
The first
letter I ever wrote for the Hudson Gazette was a sort of protest review of "The Lark", by Jean Anouilh, mounted in 1968 by
the Players Club in a very ambitious production on a specially enlarged stage, a production which had struck me as remarkably
successful but which had received a singularly tepid notice in that newspaper. I thus announced a fascination of mine for
theatre, which in due course I was to indulge as a participant, tentatively at first with the Music Club in its G & S productions,
and then in the Players Club.
Let others who do not share that fascination be warned - this section of largely sentimental
reminiscence is not for them.
Hudson has been quite exceptional in the quality of its theatre for many years,
in spite of, or perhaps in part because of, the poverty of the stage facilities available there, conditions which I have noticed
tend anywhere to stimulate and challenge, rather than to discourage, really good amateurs. And why does the place have really
good amateurs? Who can say?
Arthur Thomson, who started the Music Club, had an astonishingly persuasive knack for
music and fun, and could and did overcome the most obdurate of Canadian diffidences to such an extent that the Club has long
survived his departure - depending mainly on what were originally a very modest collection of talents, mine included, and
led by semi-professional stars from outside Hudson to begin with, under Clint Ward's regime. This has all gradually changed,
until now the club has its own roster of local leads and some high ambitions, though it has still a pleasingly amateur air
about many of its productions.
The Players Club was something else (I can say that again). Quite notoriously dominated
by Hudson residents expatriated from the southern and more make-believe half of Great Britain, who grew up with the dressing-up
box and charades on Sunday, it has been able to recruit itself constantly from much the same source and hence is constantly
in some danger of becoming a clique - although now a rather large one. But a clique can be a very efficient way of developing
expertise, and the enthusiasm, wit, and skill of this group has offered a guarantee of professionalism in their productions
that few towns of Hudson's size enjoy.
I took a (pretty minor) part in the Music Club productions from 1968 on,
so could hardly in any decency write their reviews. However, after both clubs had moved from the High School stage to the
much larger one at CitŽ des Jeunes, I was enlisted for a small part in the Players Club's ambitious and memorable production
of "Mother Courage", in the spring of 1972, and was thus compelled to pass up joining the chorus in the really innovative
version of "The Yeoman of the Guard" that was mounted a month or so later by Clint Ward.
Those were astonishingly
productive years for Hudson drama. Besides notable productions by these two clubs, the High School put on some remarkable
performances under Stan Mallough's leadership, and there were also independent productions of quality each year, mounted,
directed and acted, and sometimes written, by the high school students on their own.
To get back to the "Yeoman",
there was all sorts of directorial inventiveness on stage, and a full size orchestra in the form of the Hudson-Macdonald High
School Band under the direction of their dynamic leader Ted West. So I wrote the review (ya gotta mention everyone, and the
box office needs any help you can give). I wrote quite impartially. Of course.
“Yeoman” rated wonderful show [4th
May 1972]
There is no question that the Hudson Music Club with its production
of The Yeoman of the Guard has lifted Gilbert and Sullivan performance in the Montreal area to new heights. The novelty and
spectacle of the direction by Clint Ward, the quality of singing by both leads and choruses, and the tremendously impressive
crowd scenes make it a unique evening of theatre that will be predictably turning away lines of people next week-end.
An
audience needs its wits about it from the moment it arrives (which should be well before the advertised time). There is much
to be taken in, already going on stage and in the theatre; the progression of events into the play itself is both unconventional
and natural, full of surprises and delights, yet smooth and masterful. One is fascinated and overwhelmed by the steady peopling
of the scene with Elizabethan Londoners, as one is to be many times through the evening in the great choral moments, which
have the majesty of grand opera.
Individually, the cast is unusually strong, uniformly delightful as singers, although
variable as actors. The accolade of the evening must go to Evan Jones with his superb Shadbolt, full of wonderful grimaces
and grotesquerie. One remembers Michael Ellis for a beautifully strong voice, Jean Minelli for a lively Phoebe matching Shadbolt's
grim force, Christine Sutherland for a fine stage presence as Dame Carruthers, Sergeant Merryll (Harry Wainwright) livening
up to her after a rather wooden first Act, Elsie (Linda Beare) lovely in both person and in voice, and Jack Point (Rodger
Bourne) not quite funny enough but with a fine streak of quiet desperation that made him a genuinely tragic figure in the
end. Good work too from Kate (Caroline Lester), Sir Richard (Stephen Rabbits), and Leonard Merryll (Jim Clelland). They all
sang beautifully. It was unfortunate that the band stood in danger of ruining some of their songs by being obtrusive with
clarinet and trumpet.
Several choral passages - men, women and children of Hudson all surpassing themselves - also
suffered from the band rushing to their aid with undue strength as the music gathered weight and moved to climax. This band
is accustomed to having people come to hear it, and well deserves much of the praise that has been lavished on it for its
tremendous development over two or three years, to the point where it is now meeting so many extraordinary demands. The young
people looked charming and they have worked extremely hard. But so have the people on the stage. If it is to play in this
league the band will have to make the audience forget it altogether. There were in fact many moments when it played with great
tact and sympathy. But the singers must be heard at all times.
A few other points, for a critic must earn his keep.
That opening crowd scene was perhaps a little rushed, for all that was going on. After all that life, the rather mechanical
treatment of dialogue by various leads at times in Act I seemed doubly old hat. The travelling spot too had its irritating,
music- hall moments, although generally the lighting and the set were full of interest and satisfaction. And that pony was
goldfishing, for sure.
But my eye, what a wonderful piece of theatre. And when Clinton B. de Ward moves on to Hollywood,
what next, Hudson?
Well, Ted West didn't like that at all, and
he wrote at some length in the next issue to say so. He was a truly remarkable music teacher and did amazing things for the
two schools, forming, leading, and playing with a wide variety of instrumental and choral groups that won the highest awards
everywhere for well over a decade. Like many such outstanding leaders, he was autocratic as all get out, and nobody was going
to tell him how to do his job. Hundreds of students from these parts have reason to remember him with gratitude and affection.
Clint
Ward was for a long time the undisputed "Artistic Director" for the Hudson Music Club, after Arthur Thompson, its somewhat
inadvertent originator, had retired (Arthur has maintained since that it was never more than his club and shouldn't have outlasted
him). Clint took immense pains - one of the traditional attributes of "genius" - and he did have a feel for what could be
done on a stage that genuinely had a touch of theatrical genius to it. He was nevertheless a royal pain in the ass-tonishing
way he pushed you around if you were in the production in any capacity - all of which was apt to be forgotten in the euphoria
following its invariable success.
Such is the background to the following ditty, sung in 1974 at the cast party of
"The Gondoliers" by a few of us (I was in the chorus of this one) in parody of one of the famous G & S patter songs, from
that operetta.
The Artistic Director [May 1974: unpublished]
(to
the tune of "The Duke of Plaza Toro" from The Gondoliers)
In enterprise of theatre, when there was any writing,
He'd
switch the dialogue around, he found it more exciting,
And when he'd finished with the plot that script was just a spectre
-
That hardly scenic, schizophrenic, photogenic forgerer,
the Artistic Director!
Chorus
We'll never get it right, ha ha!
It's all wrong on the night, ha ha!
That hardly scenic, schizophrenic,
photogenic forgerer,
the Artistic Director!
If he had nothing else to do he'd order
a rehearsal,
And just as soon as all was clear he'd make complete reversal -
Till no one knew their left from right,
their elbow from rear sector -
That too frenetic, energetic, pyrotechnic paragon,
the
Artistic Director!
Chorus We'll never get it right, ha ha!
It's all wrong on the night, ha ha!
That
too frenetic, energetic, pyrotechnic paragon,
the Artistic Director!
And when the hour
was half past twelve and everyone was socked out,
He'd wander through the dressing
room and claim it was a knockout,
And all the girls would soften up and swallow
it like nectar -
That fascinating, irritating, enervating, note-dictating,
liquor hating, tenor-baiting, coruscating
character,
the Artistic Director!
Chorus We'll never get it right, ha ha!
It's
all wrong on the night, ha ha!
That fascinating, irritating, enervating, note-dictating,
liquor hating, tenor-baiting,
coruscating character,
the Artistic Director!
(Slower and slower)
But Judgment Day
shall come at last, of that you may be certain,
And all the souls who've lived on earth will take their final
curtain:
When
heavenly host and Holy Ghost have praised the Lord Jehovah,
- - - Guess who will
give them reams of notes and make Them do it over?
Chorus (Fast) They'll
never get it right, ha ha!
It's all wrong on the night, ha ha!
Clint Ward will give them reams of notes
and make Them do it over!
The Players Club also were
using the Cité des Jeunes theatre at this time, and it had become - after an initial bout of marked suspicion, for Dorion
likes to make clear it is not at all an English part of the world - rather a fashionable thing for Hudson audiences to go
there, with its carpeted foyer and bar and all. I was not then a member, but I knew several of the cast quite well and got
pained looks from one or two for some of the things I said about them. Perhaps painful honesty in reviewing does not have
to be quite so painstakingly even-handed as I was concerned to show myself here.
A
Spirited Coward [28th November 1974]
A large audience enjoyed themselves at the Cité des Jeunes
on Saturday night. Whether they were enjoying the society of fellow playgoers after the long abstention; or the gusto of Hudson's
robuster Rutherford, Helen Zajchowski; or the lines and humours of Noel Coward; it all made for a very agreeable evening,
the hazards of amateur production notwithstanding.
These three pleasurable elements overlapped each other to some
extent, in accidental ways. A poltergeist got loose from the séances on stage and into the house lights, plunging the audience
waiting there into repeated blackness as a reminder to get themselves to the seats they were already sitting in, whilst in
the steadily lighted foyer the happy mob babbled on unknowingly well into the second act. It was admirable professionalism
that had David Clayton and Janet Baillies carrying on, on stage, as if the steady roar of the revellers returning to their
seats only signalled their rapt attention. The same pair, as Ruth and Charles, had had difficult moments in the first scene,
which they handled with aplomb but with understandably low key, so that Madame Arcati's entrance appeared calculated to lift
the entire play up in her brawny arms alone, occasioning for a while a distinct loss of balance between the other characters
on stage and herself. Somewhat to our surprise we found ourselves - at a Noel Coward play - laughing at the buffoonery going
on rather than at the lines being spoken.
But from there on the show travelled on its polished rails with a balance
and assurance that spoke of firm direction imposing a style of its own (Adrian Waller) on the ensemble of players. The set
had an almost classic poise, and the movement about its incredibly wide-screen spaces was always satisfying (although people
did rather whiz in and out of that door up centre, or mount it like a pulpit for their exit lines). The later scenes particularly
sang along, the innumerable interactions of players, remarks, situations and animated props negotiated at speed, the audience
hanging on at every turn.
It is probably within the power of the Players Club to mount a fully professional production
of "Blithe Spirit". But it is unwise to underestimate Noel Coward, and you do not get away with doing him in anything of a
hurry. Not that there were any signs of hurry in last week's production - on the contrary. But the true blitheness of spirit
that can come only with being completely at ease with the lines was not yet consistently there.
Each part in this play,
except - God Save the English Upper Classes! - the one representative of the lower orders, is potentially somewhat more of
a real person than the players seemed at this stage to expect.
Given a bit more time one might predict that some of
the minor scales would fall away and that the whole thing would shine. The temptation to achieve the Coward style mainly through
mannerism - to quack the lines or twitter them in the presumed accents of English society - is difficult to avoid, just as
declamation is the trap in Shakespeare. The lines don't need help, from working face or straining hand, but timing. There
was still some of the former around the other night, though there was a great deal - to our delight - of the latter.
Then
too, there was our familiarity with some of these players in these kinds of role, possibly the greatest threat of all to the
achievement of genuine theatre. A moderating hand had clearly been at work on our friends in the cast. David Clayton - he
of the pointy feet - was both the hero of the play and the hero of the night, the humanity emerging to humorous fulfilment
in his final speech. Helen Zajchowski's first entrance had the broad exuberance of the circus about it, so welcome was her
manner to the appreciative crowd; but her delicious absurdities later wove themselves intrinsically into the play, and there
are many images to remember.
One remembers too the two wives in astral distress, united in their discomfiture. Janet
Baillie had a long and demanding role, played with an almost unrelievedly brittle exasperation, yet with fire. Pamela Birks
as Elvira seemed at first harder and tougher than her kittenish lines, but became wonderfully petulant and woebegone as her
plans went astray.
The Bradmans (Doug Hayward and Joan Rys) perhaps a little glossy for the period, were in a poorer position
than the others to develop their identities, having much less scope, but they sustained the tone of things very agreeably
and with good delivery. Sandy Kinseley as the maid Edith had to do some conspicuous overtime in the twilight (why not some
quiet music to cover her?) and her part as a key figure in the plot was strongly played.
We all liked it a lot and
have much to talk about for days to come.
Having dabbled thus
far, and having realised a youthful dream of glory the previous fall, playing Mr. Badger in the Players Club's "Toad of Toad
Hall", I ventured on directing for the first time, in the Easter of 1976, at the instigation of Mike Ellis. Mike led the St.
James Church Choir with great energy and enthusiasm, and as we were working on Handel's Passion it occurred to him, in the
general climate of theatrical activity of those years, that we might dramatise it a bit. I've never been sure if he had quite
bargained for what he got, but I've always been grateful for the trust he showed.
I wrote connecting bits of dialogue,
put the thing in modern dress (the 60's were still almost with us), got Terry Snazel to do us some quite dramatic lighting
in the chancel, and called the presentation "Just Another Execution". The execution itself was accordingly carried out with
a pair of extremely realistic - and shatteringly loud - machine guns. All this didn't go down well with the doctrinal views
of some, but the Reverend (later Canon) Cecil Royle stoutly endorsed it, and I have always been really proud of the presentation
the choir and its lead singers gave on that Maundy Thursday evening, before a rather small congregation.
Accordingly,
I will strain the reader's patience here with the synopsis, that appeared in our newspaper:
"Just
Another Execution" [April 1976]
The figures of the drama speak and sing the words from the
story of the Passion, while performing its events in the manner of today. The audience is invited to participate in these
events as immediate onlookers, for whom this, just as it must have seemed in the Palestine of 2000 years ago, is just another
execution for reasons of state. The central figure appears to be any one of the hundreds of people deliberately put to death
- on behalf, of course, of the greater good of the greater number - in any year throughout human history, including the present.
The action is therefore a mixture of the symbolic and the real, the central reality being a somewhat fearful thing.
In
the fall of the same year, the PQ having won the election, the Music Club found itself in increasing difficulties after the
departure of Clint Ward along with a few hundred other anglos along the 401 to Toronto. The Music Club wasn't alone. Hudson's
heyday of theatrical activity was apparently over, for the CitŽ des Jeunes was becoming prohibitively expensive. We would
have to go back to the High School with its neglected stage and metal seats (they weren't new even then), if they would have
us.
It was after two distinct starts had been made that fall for the annual production in the following spring,
that the Club emerged in the New Year of 1977 without a stage director and without a show, and Mike Ellis its Musical Director
began to think in terms of a concert-style presentation, of excerpts from the G & S shows of the previous years. The man was
a slow learner; he asked me - again - to put together some continuity for this concert, and to direct its staging.
So
it occurred to me that if you are going to have some continuity you might as well make it Gilbertian, and as I had been finding
in a most readable little book by John Thompson (Cavagnal 1820-1867) some really Gilbertian situations in Hudson's real history
- at a time, of the Patriotes in 1837, of strikingly parallel problems of conflict between French and English - I began to
figure new uses for some of the songs in our repertoire, and ways of working them in to a story line. (It had been Mike's
idea to have tenors sing some of the sopranos' songs, basses the altos', and so on.)
This story, an entire new operetta
with familiar G & S songs, would at the same time throw light - misleadingly but I hoped interestingly - on Hudson's own quite
dramatic history, and take some of the mickey out of the current pretty racist antagonisms in our own population. It would
also have to distribute leading parts generously among many untried local voices, Clint having mostly used semi-professionals
of his acquaintance (some of whom who had had difficulty finding Hudson on the map).
There were two hectic months.
I remember writing dialogue instead of correcting papers on the train each day as I tried to keep ahead of rehearsals. And
in due course the thing actually went on, in crisis right up to the Dress Rehearsal. And I put the following explanation in
the program:
"The Countess of Cavagnal" [May 1977: program note]
A
note from the Director
It was on a cold winter's day in Hudson that the manuscript of "The Countess of Cavagnal",
which had lain here unknown and unsuspected for about a century, first came to light a little over two months ago. One February
morning Mr. John Vipond was sitting "in contemplative fashion" in one of the outlying edifices of his extensive rural estate,
idly perusing a paper that had just come to hand, when his eye caught certain phrases that aroused his more immediate attention.
As Past President of the Hudson Historical Society, he became quickly aware that what he had been about to dispose of, summarily
and quite irretrievably, was a document of unique interest. How great was his good fortune to find that most of the manuscript,
of which he had been reading one of the first pages, was indeed immediately to hand, hanging on a nail.
Some time
later Mr. Vipond arose from a prolonged reading - to the bitter end - of this remarkable work, his senses numb but his mind
reeling with the significance of his discovery. Quite apart from the clear internal evidence that this was a script that was
due to make theatrical history of some sort, it seemed almost certain that at least W.S.Gilbert, if not Sir Arthur Sullivan
also, had lived in Hudson for some time in the 1860s or 70s, enough to absorb some of its then recent history. Friends meeting
Mr. Vipond today will notice his preoccupied air, as he reflects on what he must have done with the priceless information
contained on some of those missing first pages.
Two months is a short time in which to put on a production as important
as this one. In the spirit of the original, however, it is a local production depending on local talent and hoping to give
pleasure to local audiences. We hope that the sense of fun that has animated the Music Club through the period of rehearsals
will communicate itself to our patrons, overriding any discomfort or shortcoming with the realisation that "East, West, home's
best".
Thin times for both clubs followed, in the years 1978 to 1981, with many a production cancelled and seasons
unfulfilled with all but rather stopgap measures. This was when the High School itself became apparently inaccessible - its
stage neglected, and the new School Board organisation, removed to Beaconsfield and struggling with continual crises in education,
hardly interested in the activities of adults in a remote and small community like Hudson.
Construction crews in
both clubs suddenly became inventive. The Music Club put on remarkably sophisticated shows of Broadway excerpts on a platform
in St. James Hall; the Players adapted themselves to the tiny old Royal Theatre, building a portable apron stage to supplement
the exiguous ledge below the movie screen. But in a year or two the Royal folded and the cosy cinema became a vegetable store
- which has since yielded to a sports emporium.
In 1982 the Players had a year of recovery and the Music Club
a year of frustration and loss. 1983 didn't look any better for the latter, so as President of the Players I proposed a joint
venture, and undertook to write another G & S imitation. I then searched the more recent history of Hudson for ideas, starting
totally unprofessionally with my title - based on a pretty awful pun. Most people have heard vaguely of the Komodo Dragon,
the world's largest lizard. The words, "The Como Dragon", seemed therefore bound to ring a bell, without anyone quite knowing
why.
Trains are always fun, and though Hudson was by now hardly served at all by the Canadian Paralytic Railway,
the early history of the romantic track along the lakeside suggested a pleasant scenario featuring the dominating local figures
of the 1880s, like Mrs. Whitlock and the Rev. Pyke, mixed in with a few fairly fanciful ones. Reading the extraordinary history
of the Megantic Outlaw from the same period gave me additional ideas, for some excitement and some Gilbertian low comedy from
the militia.
It worked out - with a cast of almost hundreds and an entirely bogus Indian maiden called Ookanoona uttering
dire warnings in the best Oka style (if only I had thought of a Mohawk Warrior, from Brooklyn -). My one regret is that the
song "Hurrah for Hodgson Heights", sung quite splendidly by Frank Cobbett as the blacksmith who had built and surreptitously
run his own engine on the new tracks, was not at once adopted by Town Hall as the official anthem for Hudson Heights (it's
not too late now, fellas).
This blurb appeared in the Hudson Gazette:
[
The
Story of the Como Dragon 11th November 1982]
(as breathed by John Harley)
It is 1888. The new railway
line from Vaudreuil to Hudson is nearly finished, and excitement is mounting; a Grand Opening of the station - by no less
a personage than the Princess Caroline of Ihrwig-Bierstein - is being planned. But the dread whisper has gone around the Indians
in Oka that the legendary monster Chamcha has been seen, and heard, once again roaming the banks of the river. The venerable
James Pyke (Peter Williamson), minister of St. James, will have none of this; but his long influence in the parish is now
being challenged by the wealth and energy of the widowed Mrs. Whitlock (Helen Zajchowski).
George Hodgson, that ingenious
blacksmith (Frank Cobbett), is up to something in his private workshop, helped as always by his daughter (Cathy Newman) [now
Cathy Hermann]. And not far away, down by the American border in the Townships, the combined efforts of police and military
have failed for over a year now to capture the elusive Donald Morrison, known as the Megantic Outlaw, and folk hero of the
community of exiled Scottish Highlanders who are helping to conceal him.
These are some of the ingredients, mostly
authentic, that make up the story of "The Como Dragon". The author takes no responsibility for the historical accuracy of
the results - only for their entertainment value.
There are other elements: What is that occasionally intelligible
Chinese gentleman (Barry Melsom) doing in the village? Is Mimi Couteau, the vivacious school teacher (Patti Hamson), really
going to throw herself away on Albert Pott, the pompous Rail Commissioner (David Clayton)? What makes her father, the Inspector
of Police (Wilf Hamson) go snooping around in the woods? Will Bill the ganger (Rus Burton) and his jailbird crew of platelayers
go on up the line without breaking a few hearts in Como? And who is the layabout who appears looking for Mimi, and who keeps
bursting into song without the least provocation? (Well, wouldn't you know - Glen Bowser)
You don't imagine you are
going to find all that out here, do you? You'll have to go see for yourself. Let me drop one hint however. The children of
Como and Hudson play the decisive part in bringing about several happy endings to the tangles all these characters get into.
And that's as it should be, in a musical play designed for the Christmas season.
I notice now that in that
list I had completely overlooked one of the most important characters in my script, Augusta MacVicar, the Outlaw's extraordinarily
faithful and real-life love, played with melting charm by Rona Waddington. Why did Rona never mention my lapse to me? I was
heartbroken when she went off to Ottawa the next year and married someone else. Could this have been why?
(Of course
I was married to someone else myself, but why be so picky?)
There was one heartening new development in these
lean years, and that was engineered, as so many other theatrical initiatives have been, by Karen Williamson, the Players Club's
most skilful director. In collaboration with Glenna Vipond as music teacher (whose inspiration I believe all this was) she
mounted in 1982 the first of a series of mini G&S operettas at Mount Pleasant Elementary School, with casts of thousands of
small people all drilled in stage action within an inch of their ebullient lives.
A notable consequence of these
Events - for each was an Event - has been that there are now a multitude of youngsters about in Hudson who can walk about
a stage with consummate assurance. (I was going to write aplomb, but I se that I have always worked this word pretty hard
as it is.) And the staffs of our elementary schools are now in the habit of mounting really ambitious and very successful
plays every year.
Going to one of these shows is an experience unique of its kind, for of course the audience
is made up of the Families of the Cast, all present and for a brief moment or two correct, from babes in arms to fathers with
video cameras; and you walk in on a floor rendered invisible under a milling sea of highly excited human small fry, seething
like a school of fish newly trapped in a tank.
I don't know how I got roped in to writing the following crit,
for the second annual effort, but I enjoyed the challenge.
[26th
May, 1983]
Mini Mikado Claims Son, Brings Down House
If you had 35 children between 2 parents, what would you
do with them? Put on a show? Of course!
That's about the proportion of small people to adult directors (86 to 5)
that "The Mikado" had. You simply organise them all so that every one of them takes part in one and a half hours of singing
and narrating and acting without doing a single thing they aren't supposed to do. Easy, eh?
How do you get them to
stay in their places? Put the chorus in rows on high benches, where they will look perfectly charming in their flower-coloured
kimonos, with chrysanthemums in their beautifully-dressed hair, and where they will fall off if they shuffle their feet. Give
all of them things to do, like narrating parts of the story in turns, so that they all concentrate like mad (the narrators
were without exception splendidly loud and clear and composed). Practise them within an inch of their lives, without letting
them get bored - like I said, perfectly easy.
Well, it worked like a charm on Thursday and Friday night last week
at Mount Pleasant School, before large and enthusiastic audiences. Everybody on that stage sang lustily and musically and
without hesitation through some 17 "Mikado" songs, with all their complicated Gilbertian words, and the entries and note-holding
would put some adult choruses to shame. Some of the most difficult to sing, like "Here's a how-de-do" and "With aspect stern",
were particularly agreeable to hear; there was a real advance in tunefulness.
The principals all conducted themselves
with great aplomb. The boys who played the opening scenes - Jamie Gogarty, Matthew Cruchet, Peter Pound, and Tyler Murphy
- got everything off to a lively start. The three little maids from school, Leila Kwan, Emily Conliffe, and Jennifer Lombardi,
enjoyed themselves delightfully. Ian Williamson as Koko attacked his lines with mastery, and his mobile moustache was a constant
entertainment. Trevor Hutchins as the Mikado conducted himself with the dignity appropriate to someone three times his size,
making the most of his big moment when, raising his hand as high as it will go to place it on the shoulder of Nanki Poo, he
imperiously informs the audience, "My son!"
Two actors who were completely at home on the stage were Jamie Gogarty,
a relaxed and genially absurd Pooh-Bah, and Nancy Hill, who as Katisha responded in character to every situation, and communicated
her feelings eloquently with expressive eyes and tossing head.
Karen Williamson and Glenna Vipond have created a formula
that is already a tradition; it successfully embroils masses of kids in a slick production that demands effort from them all,
and is enthralling from the sheer delight of seeing them do complicated things well. It may not make for the most exciting
theatre, for hardly does a bit of action begin but a narrator steps forward, but it admirably suits its function of getting
as many participants as possible involved in a disciplined and constantly interesting way. Perhaps the few bits of "business"
given to the leads could get a fraction more rehearsal and thus relieve some of the more static moments, but the whole effect
was of a rapidly moving and visually pleasing scenario.
The stage with its new curtains looked most attractive, the
musicians played "Miya Sama" firmly with suitably Eastern effect, Rosemary Angier's accompaniment tactfully sustained and
cued those choral entries. And even the program, with its neat and elegant lettering, reflected the high standards of the
whole performance.
(And it wasn't easy.)
In 1986 I was invited by the staff of Mount
Pleasant to review that year's successor, called Rana's Pond, which was the product of what had really been a whole school
effort. And I did write something, but the Gazette had sent its own reporter, so my review got a private circulation, a few
weeks later, among those who had been involved - who after all had made up just about the population of an entire town anyway.
Rana's Glittering Pond [May 1986: unpublished]
It has become an annual event unique of its kind. One saunters up to Mount Pleasant School on a fine Spring evening,
to submerge (in the gymnasium) in a sea of spring peepers and peep springers, all springing and peeping with proprietary excitement.
Here and there parents break the surface, like bumps on a log. The expensive gadgetry of suburbia - cameras, recorders, and
video outfits - is much in evidence. The Principal of the school waits patiently in the hubbub for minutes on end to introduce
the show. There is finally a sort of silence. The lights go out -
Glenna Vipond and Karen Williamson initiated these
events some four years ago, putting several score of small people on a stage before their worshipping families, in their highly
stylized versions of complete Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, difficult undertakings calling for enormous effort by themselves
and groups of parents. On Thursday and Friday evening last, these highly disciplined beginnings flowered - there can be no
other word for it - into a show of extraordinary accomplishment, the entire staff of the school bringing about a wholly delightful,
and skilful, and thoroughly entertaining show called "Rana's Pond", that will live in the memory of all who saw it.
So
the lights go out, and in march eighty-eight (count 'em) small figures - the chorus - right on cue. The curtain parts, and
the audience gasps with delight: Darkness, and a row of luminous pairs of eyes, a forest scene at night with fireflies winking,
Rana the Bullfrog nonchalantly greeting us with friendly aplomb, and one or two luminous flippers scratching unseen noses.
The usual proud fathers, unable to see more than one performer in the entire show, fire off their infuriating flashes. And
we're off with a swing at a pace that never falters, with witty situations and dialogue, catchy songs sung sweet and strong,
lively confrontations and striking costumes. It was all amazingly well rehearsed.
There was a great deal to admire.
Cues were picked up with enviable speed, voices and faces carefully projected towards the audience, gestures easy and right;
gone was the familiar woodenness of children on show. The songs were musically sung, their final notes were held, you could
HEAR the WORDS (yet, strangely, no stern adult was wielding any baton). The leads without exception possessed their stage
with astonishing self-assurance: Jessica McLean as Rana carried the biggest role with charm and intelligence; and few adults
could have carried off the collapse (twice) of a large stage prop with the easy nonchalance of Chris Dye, as Bill Bord.
Among
the several exuberant groups of frogs, chefs, "litter kids", painters, and city managers, I give full marks to that lively
class of students, expertly handling their many-sided dialogues; and to the "ladies from S.P.I.N.C.E.", gorgeously languid
in their long summer dresses and parasols, quite clearly the future queen bees of Hudson and destined no doubt for the Ladies
Committee of the Yacht Club.
If there could be any criticisms of the show, useful perhaps for the next time, it would
be these: the attempts to organize dancing in lines are surely doomed (not even Broadway does it any more); because children's
voices tend to sound much alike, some key moments in dialogue need firm direction in timing; especially in the second act,
the lessons from former years of discipline in movement had been forgotten - there was a good deal of milling about to distract
us from the speakers.
It must feel good to belong to Mount Pleasant School these days. Weeks of hard work on theatrical
productions lead to exhilarating results, and act like a tonic on any school or club. Let the High School take note; the talent
is always there, and so are the facilities.
____________ooo___________
To come
to the end, of what for want of my unprecedented restraint might have been much longer, I shall include here verses I wrote
in 1987 while spending an unexpected day at Mirabel Airport (very serenely too I might add, for Mirabel is a quiet, lonely,
and restful place in daytime) having managed to miss my plane for England the night before.
The occasion was the
AGM of the Players Club in its 40th year. There was to be a mammoth slide show of past productions, I had been asked to write
something, time had not permitted while I tried to get off on a month's visit, and Peter Williamson was supposed to spout
the stuff. I sent him it hand-written, so I have no idea what he actually spoke, poor guy. If he indeed spoke it. By the time
I got back again, all was forgotten - and given the florid, quasi-elegiac, portentous, and sentimental tone of the piece I
am not at all surprised.
So, perversely, just to ensure the thing be given another chance that it hardly deserves,
I use it here as a sort of dunce's cap, to snuff out this section, and this book –
On showing slides of past productions [May
1987]
in the Hudson Players Club's 40th year
Forty years back, eh? Please do not inquire -
Such questions
do not please the middle-age-ed.
We still can show, on boards, some youth-like fire,
And life seems quite as sparkling
as we stage it.
Let make-up make up what we fail to act
And audiences suspend their disbelief -
Why should we ever
come to terms with fact
Until the Take-down takes us down, to grief?
When all the world's a stage, what's forty
years?
Old pantaloon could shine his morning charms;
Or bearded like the pard to hide his fears
Fall mewling and
puking in his mother's arms -
If only she lived yet. (Alas, not so!)
We play some parts, but cannot play them all;
Age
plays a prelude to inevitable ends
That are not "tragic", get no curtain call,
Earn no applause - and after them the
leads
Do not attend the party for the cast
To hear congratulations on their show.
This world's no stage in fact.
Its past is past.
So it's a world it's fun to get away from,
Up on the platform, in the electric sun -
And take
some brilliant pictures while we're at it
So that what's done is not forever done.
There Karen's aye a schoolgirl, Helen
limber
As a young Amazon, and David cute
And bland as a young Gielgud or Novello -
The sort of chap a husband loves
to shoot;
And beardless Peter, rather scary fellow,
Stares at us wildly from the unfelled timber.
In spring they
come again, from life's wild garden.
Conceived in moments of amity and pleasure,
Nourished haphazard in the womb of
time,
At length delivered, with no pain, at leisure -
These tinted shadows merely, stilled in mime,
Whole fields
of flowers from the Forest of Arden.
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