ballpoint pens were just coming into use.1 More widely used for letters and note-taking was the fountain pen, which sucked up ink from small glass bottles set into specially designed holes on each student’s desk. When pumped full, these pens could be made to gush ink over a considerable distance. One evening during a study period, Mr. Cockburn, the master in charge, stepped out for a couple of minutes. Shiggy Banks launched a stream of ink at Jimmy Conklin. Sitting midway between the two, Peter was sprayed by tiny drops of blue ink. Soon the room erupted into a general melee. In his introduction to A Sense of Tradition, a book celebrating the centenary of Ridley College, Peter was at his best in re-creating the battle, complete with literary and cinematic allusions: “By now, hostilities are spreading. Incidental skirmishes break out on the perimeter. Pens dip to inkwells. Pump, load, slurp, fire. No one is safe. The air is wet with ink. Faces, white shirts, brown desks … everything is spattered with blue Rorschach stains and arpeggios of polka dots.” It was a slugfest straight out of a Roy Rogers movie, imagined Peter. “And I am in the thick of it,” he continued, “happily splashing, happily splashed. I drench Freddy Lapp. Harry Malcolmson drenches me. Norrie Walker hits a double — Bob Broad and John Girvin with the same roundhouse swing. Broad gets me. I go for Walker. By the time that Mr. Cockburn returns, the damage is done. We are the sons of Harlech, drenched in woad.” After cleanup the boys returned to their rooms. Finally, Peter felt that he was one of the boys.
Like the story of skating endlessly over fields of ice, or the tale of Peter’s scoring the winning goal in the seventh game of the Stanley Cup, the ink fight owes much to Peter’s imagination. Its rise and fall, its suspense, climax, and denouement are the characteristics of a good short story. Today Norris Walker, who scored that double, has no recollection of the incident. Others have only vague memories, some of them no doubt created by Peter’s account in Sense of Tradition. In his fertile imagination, Peter converted the rudiments of a fight into a story whose theme is the quest to belong. Ink and battles were fitting metaphors for Peter. Throughout his working life he created articles and stories with ink, he fought battles with ink, and it is in ink that he has left a legacy in articles, books, letters, and the scripts of his radio and television shows.
According to Peter, the road to this private boys’ school in St. Catharines was paved with loneliness and failure. Christmas 1949 wasn’t a happy time for the fifteen-year-old. The results of his Christmas exams at Galt Collegiate, he claimed, were disastrous. During the autumn of 1949, he had spent too much time sipping lemon Coke at Moffat’s or “trying to make a pink ball” at Nick’s. Peter’s version of his problems bears a striking resemblance to the story told by his favourite fictional hero, Holden Caulfield. “I wasn’t supposed to come back after Christmas vacation,” Caulfield tells readers of The Catcher in the Rye, “on account of I was flunking four subjects and not applying myself and all.”2 On Boxing Day 1949, Peter headed for Toronto. There are, of course, several versions of the event, including one told by Peter, that, like Holden Caulfield, he ran away from home, his belongings in a bandana.3 More likely, he was driven to Toronto, perhaps by his mother and stepfather. He often visited his grandparents and his father on weekends. Soon the Gzowskis made arrangements to send the boy to a private school where he might improve with stronger discipline. No doubt they talked it over with his mother and stepfather. It was Peter’s father, Harold, who made arrangements with J.R. Hamilton, the headmaster at Ridley.
The college had long Gzowski connections. In the late 1880s, Sir Casimir Gzowski had joined with other wealthy Torontonians to buy an old sanitarium called Springbank in St. Catharines. It became the college’s first building and was used until it was destroyed by fire in 1903. Two of Peter’s great-uncles had been among the first boarders at Ridley when it opened in September 1889. Peter’s father had also enrolled at the college midway through high school in September 1927 at age sixteen.
The Gzowskis bought Peter appropriate Ridley attire — grey flannel slacks, white shirts, and a blue blazer. It was Harold Gzowski who suggested that Peter revert to “Gzowski.” His delighted grandmother sewed tags bearing the name peter john gzowski into his new clothing. Shortly after New Year’s Day, Harold borrowed the Colonel’s Morris Minor to drive Peter to St. Catharines along a snowy Queen Elizabeth Way (QEW). Peter always recalled passing the stone lion west of Toronto, unveiled in 1939 by Queen Elizabeth, consort of King George VI, as part of the official opening ceremonies of the QEW.4
Soon after arriving at the lovely campus, whose mix of Queen Anne, early Georgian, and perpendicular Gothic emulated Eton and other private boys’ schools in Great Britain, “Peter John Gzowski” signed the student registry. He was number 3084, which meant that he was the 3,084th student to register at the college since its founding. Although “Brown” was banished from his name, there is a Brown family story that Reg Brown helped to pay for Peter’s education, a story with credibility, given the pinched financial circumstances of the Gzowskis. In his memoirs and his introduction to A Sense of Tradition, both published in 1988, Peter paints a picture of a bewildered, lonely boy of fifteen surrounded by strangers already familiar with Ridley routines and regulations and already adept at “swapping lies about life at home.” As boys rushed back to their dorms after being dropped off by parents, Peter “stood bewildered in the dark hall of Dean’s House,” which was the college’s oldest surviving residence, opened in 1909. The other residents knew not only one another’s names but also nicknames, proof that they belonged, and that he did not.
Peter was exaggerating his loneliness, for he really hadn’t been dropped into a completely alien environment. He already knew Jim Chaplin, who had been the captain of the Galt Collegiate basketball team, whose members, including Peter, had played at Ridley. Ten years later, in an article in Maclean’s on April 22, 1961, Peter admitted that, even before he arrived at Ridley, he already knew several of the boys there.
Understandably, Ridley rituals were new to Peter, from Latin grace to “houses” without kitchens, as well as chapel, caning, and “masters,” who he quickly learned to call “sir.” He soon realized that he was living not far from battle sites of the War of 1812. He could walk the route of Laura Secord when she warned the British officers and Canadian militia that the Americans were coming.5
At Galt Collegiate, Peter had “wriggled out of Latin,” but at Ridley he was “grinding out” his Latin verbs. Master J.F. Pringle, who taught English literature and composition, kept Peter in line. A wounded veteran of the Great War, Pringle was “occasionally morose,” Peter told Professionally Speaking in 1998, “but also very sharp and quite a pleasure to be around.” In both his memoirs and in Professionally Speaking, Peter noted that Pringle inspired him “to write clearly and well.” In fact, Peter was “something of a star” in Pringle’s composition class, except on one occasion when Peter wrote “a stream of consciousness piece.” Pringle “kicked the living Jesus out of it” by making “caustic comments” and giving Peter a failing grade. “What he meant to me,” Peter concluded, “was don’t be pretentious. Don’t try to be something that you’re not.”6 Pringle was no doubt vexed at Peter when the English teacher read a poem that alluded to Jesus Christ, and Peter asked if this wasn’t the same J. Christ of New Testament fame. One of his classmates remembered that Peter asked the question with a slight stammer, which later, on radio, became one of his trademarks.
Peter was a great disappointment to the choirmaster, who assumed that the son would have inherited his father’s melodious singing voice. “Poor Sid Bett,” Peter recalled. “It was as if Howie Morenz Junior had showed up at hockey camp and couldn’t skate.” Although off-key, Peter loved to sing hymns — his favourite was “Jerusalem” by William Blake. He was also a disappointment to his French master, for he was a year behind in French and never did catch up.
For anything not terribly important like shining shoes and knotting ties, he found ways to fake it. He quickly learned “where to slip down the Hog’s Back for a butt before dinner.” Peter also smoked in the communal showers, where headmasters were unlikely to patrol and where the smoke was camouflaged by mist. He was caught at least once and was strapped by a member of the staff. Within the first six weeks, Peter had served an hour’s detention for saucing a duty boy. He wrote home with the latest hockey scores and with a request for more money to