Lost in Cabbagetown by Terry Burke

Author:Terry Burke [Burke, Terry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIOGRAPHY … AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9781459750807
Publisher: Dundurn Press
Published: 2022-12-12T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

I was so busy working throughout the month of August that I rarely had a chance to see any of my friends. According to the kids on our street, it looked like St. Martin’s was still under construction, and with any luck, it wouldn’t be ready before the spring. I wanted to believe all the rumours, but I had to see it for myself.

On Sunday, when the work site was quiet, Donny, Harold, and I were able to sneak through the back gate and make our way right up to the gaping hole that would eventually become the rear entrance to the school. We may not have known anything about construction, but even we could see that, with barely a week left in August, St. Martin’s couldn’t possibly be ready by Labour Day. I thought about how much money I could make working all those extra hours at the drug store. I was never very good at doing math in my head, but if the school remained closed until after Christmas, surely I could make a small fortune.

My euphoria lasted less than two days. When I came home from work on Tuesday evening, Mamie showed me a letter that had arrived from the school that day. For every Catholic kid in our corner of Cabbagetown, all their hopes of freedom came to a sudden end. As of the following Tuesday, the day after Labour Day, the St. Martin’s students would be divided up into two groups. All those in kindergarten through grade four would attend the public school on Spruce Street, while the remainder of us would attend Our Lady of Lourdes School, all the way up at the top of Sherbourne Street.

Our Lady of Lourdes was much larger than St. Martin’s, but like every other Catholic school of that era, they were already working at full capacity. Our unplanned arrival left them with little choice than to erect yet another row of portable classrooms.

That first week was a complete waste of time. Our portable classroom had just been installed and the electric light and heating system were still being hooked up. The first day of school was a warm September day, but the classroom felt cool and damp. Our new teacher, Mr. Burns, didn’t seem particularly interested in doing anything that first day. Most of the morning he had us doing arithmetic problems straight out of our textbook while he read the newspaper. Once we saw that he wasn’t paying attention, we began whispering the answers back and forth. If someone did ask a question, they almost had to shout in order to be heard over all the banging and hammering of the workmen just outside the door. If we hadn’t been shivering inside the classroom, maybe we would have found the situation rather comical.

Mr. Burns didn’t care where we sat. Whether at the back or front, he ignored us all. Like it or not, we were about to spend the next few months listening to a man who had absolutely no interest in getting to know any of us.

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