Probably for the first time, Peter met an African American, a boy called E. Abelard Shaw. In 1961, Peter wrote about Shaw in Maclean’s in an article called “My First Negro.” “His features were Negroid all right,” Peter wrote. “He had tight curly hair and a wide, flat nose and full lips that were almost always curved in an enigmatic smile.” In the article, Peter called him Fuzzy-Wuzzy, which is what Rudyard Kipling called Sudanese warriors, not as a compliment, in a poem of the same name. The son of a dentist from Brooklyn, New York, Shaw was admitted to Ridley in spite of an unofficial colour ban. He was an outsider for other reasons: he didn’t smoke, he didn’t play pinball, and he suffered from body odour, as Peter mentioned twice in the article.
Worse, Shaw refused to take part in the Battle of Ridley. “He even kept his inkwell covered so that no one else could fill up at his desk,” Peter wrote in the Maclean’s article. And when the master returned to find the inky mess, Shaw even announced that he hadn’t participated. In the Maclean’s article, Peter’s discomfort is palpable as he recalled his view of Shaw during the early 1950s, especially in a sentence like “I was no more convinced that Shaw wasn’t fit to be my friend than I would have been if he wore crutches.” Peter usually wrote in a much clearer, simpler style. Two negatives and the conditional tense of the verb make for a rather convoluted, worried sentence.
During the late 1980s, when Peter came to write his account of the ink fight in A Sense of Tradition, Shaw had vanished completely from the narrative. Perhaps he didn’t fit neatly enough into the theme of belonging. While Peter would eventually become one of the gang, Shaw was never completely accepted, even when he lost a heavyweight boxing tournament and was awarded a trophy for trying.
Peter had the good fortune that his roommate was John Girvin, who had also transferred to Ridley in early January 1950. At first neither boy wanted to be at Ridley, but they soon adjusted. Girvin was not only an excellent scholar but also a fine athlete. While never as skilled as Girvin, Peter loved sports. In the pages of Acta Ridleiana, one glimpses Peter in the various stages of his two and a half years at Ridley. Soon after arriving, he joined the basketball team. In a team photograph published in Acta in March 1950, Peter stands in the back row, tall and gangly, looking a bit lost, as if he hasn’t quite settled in to Ridley routines. His face shows a touch of acne. He is one of the tallest on the team. A year later, in March 1951, the basketball photograph shows a rather forlorn Peter, the acne on his face more pronounced and clearly visible on his shoulders. At age sixteen he is no longer among the tallest. And he no longer stands tall. What happened between these two photographs helps to explain the change.
On Thursday, August 24, 1950, after a two-week hospitalization, Margaret Brown died. Peter claimed that no one had told him of her illness. The news came as a shock. Margaret was only forty. In announcing her death, Galt’s Evening Reporter of August 25 listed her relatives as Reg Brown, Peter, the late McGregor Young, Margaret’s mother, her sister, Jean Rowe and her brother, Brigadier Gregor Young, all of Toronto. Harold Gzowski received no mention.
Her funeral was held on Sunday, August 27, at Little’s Funeral Home in Galt. The next day the Reporter noted that Harold had helped to carry his ex-wife to her grave at Galt’s Mount View Cemetery. The papers, of course, didn’t report the cause of her death, but the town was already speculating. In small towns, neighbours not only know of excessive drinking but exactly where in the house the drinker hides half-empty bottles. In hushed tones, the townsfolk talked of cirrhosis of the liver. At the funeral and afterward at the tea, Norma Brown, sister-in-law of Reg, noticed the abandoned sixteen-year-old, silent and slouching in a corner. Peter seemed a pleasant young man, she thought, but perhaps because he was shy, and no doubt overwhelmed by grief, he kept to himself. His mother’s death, “and the years of loneliness and unfulfilment that led up to it,” he wrote in his memoirs almost four decades later, “scarred my soul more than the acne marked my skin. I miss her still.”7 The memory of her brought tears to his eyes on CBC’s Life & Times.
Ridley College basketball team, March 1950 — Peter in back row, second player from left.
(Courtesy Paul Lewis and Ridley College Archives)
When he returned to Ridley in September 1950, Peter didn’t grieve. At least outwardly. In fact, some of his mates there can’t recall that he even mentioned his mother’s death. It wasn’t the manly thing to do. After all, Ridley, like all private schools, taught Peter muscular Christianity. A man wasn’t expected to show his emotions, and young men and boys were governed by expressions such as “take it like a man.”
However, Peter remembered his Ridley years as “three of the best years” of his life. No doubt student shenanigans helped take his mind off his grief. He reported in a Maclean’s article of 1961 that one day, or more likely one night, a group of boys carried the history master’s tiny English car up to the second floor of the building where they took their classes.
College sports were also a welcome diversion. In the autumn of 1950, he was an alternative for the Ridley football team, and in one photograph he stands with other alternative players in Varsity Stadium in Toronto. Behind them is a view of Bloor Street. He was determined to make it to the first team. During the summer of 1951, he practised throwing footballs. When he returned to Ridley in September, he so impressed the coach that he was asked to play quarterback on the first football team. In the team photograph, Peter is standing in the back row on a chilly November day in 1951. He sports a broad grin. John Girvin is in the photograph, and so, too, are Jim Conklin and Jack Barton. Headmaster Hamilton sits in the centre. The quarterback holds a football marked 1951. Around his neck Peter is wearing a sling that holds up his right arm. In the Globe and Mail of December 22, 2001, he offered an explanation. During tackling practice, he had crashed into John Girvin, a collision that resulted in a broken bone in Peter’s right hand. Years later, in a column for the Toronto Star, he upped the ante by claiming he had broken two bones in his hand. In an article in Saturday Night in January 1965, he claimed that, while playing football, he had broken a bone in his foot. Soccer was less strenuous, and Acta Ridleiana, the Easter 1951 issue, shows Peter and ten other members of Dean’s House Soccer Team.
Ridley was, however, more than just pigskin, broken bones, and books. The Midsummer 1951 issue of Acta depicts a group of partying boys, all smiling and laughing, especially Peter, who throws back his head, closes his eyes, and laughs harder than anyone else. Acta published a few of Peter’s short articles. In the Easter 1951 issue, he argued in favour of Sunday sports. “Self-righteous dowagers and demagogues have slandered the very name of Sunday sport, crying piteously that it is heresy and sacrilege,” he wrote in a self-confident style with an overlay of pretense. He believed that “Sunday afternoons should become a Canadian institution, something to be proud of like maple trees,” adding that since gas stations and drugstores were allowed to remain open on Sundays, why not sports stadiums? He quickly put paid to the argument that Sunday sports would lead to Sunday movies, grocery stores, pool halls, and beer parlours. He was a bit ahead of his time — Premier Leslie Frost, municipal politicians, and indeed a majority of Ontarians weren’t ready to follow Peter’s advice.
Autumn 1950 alternatives for the Ridley College football team at Varsity Stadium on Bloor Street in Toronto, Peter in the middle.
(Courtesy Paul Lewis and Ridley College Archives)
On May 4, 1951, the Ridley Sixth Form (grade twelve) held a debate: “Resolved — that a camel makes a better house pet than an elephant.” Master Pringle was the “speaker” or moderator. Peter, who debated under the title “an Honourable Member from the Orient,” argued for the negative. He informed the audience that “the elephant was a great animal,” and threw in “numerous quotations” to prove his point. He had prepared carefully and possibly had consulted an encyclopedia and some of the other books in the school library.8 When the debate began, the