several times to get in touch with Maxwell, his father-in-law, hoping he would take the child off his hands, but the old man had disappeared. It would be just my luck the auld fool’s daid, he thought.
Glace Bay was a town of transients who moved in and out of the boarding houses. They came from France and China and the Ukraine. They were Italian and Irish and Greek, carpenters and tailors and plumbers and shoemakers. They swarmed into lower Main Street, Bell Street, North Street and Water Street, near the waterfront area. They came to work the mines and cut timber and fish the seas. Glace Bay was a frontier town, primitive and rugged. The weather was an abomination. The winters were harsh with heavy snowfalls that lasted until April, and because of the heavy ice in the harbour, even April and May were cold and windy, and from July to October it rained.
There were eighteen boarding houses in town, some of them accommodating as many as seventy-two guests. At the boarding house managed by James Cameron, there were twenty-four boarders, most of them Scotsmen.
Lara was hungry for affection, without knowing what the hunger was. She had no toys or dolls to cherish nor any playmates. She had no one except her father. She made childish little gifts for him, desperate to please him, but he either ignored or ridiculed them.
When Lara was five years old, she overheard her father say to one of the boarders, ‘The wrong child died, ye ken. My son is the one who should hae lived.’
That night Lara cried herself to sleep. She loved her father so much. And she hated him so much.
When Lara was six, she resembled a Keane painting, enormous eyes in a pale, thin face. That year, a new boarder moved in. His name was Mungo McSween, and he was a huge bear of a man. He felt an instant affection for the little girl.
‘What’s your name, wee lassie?’
‘Lara.’
‘Ah. ’Tis a braw name for a braw bairn. Dae ye gan to school, then?’
‘School? No.’
‘And why not?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Weel, we maun find out.’
And he went to find James Cameron. ‘I’m tauld your bairn does nae gae to school.’
‘And why should she? She’s only a girl. She dinna need nae school.’
‘You’re wrong, mon. She maun have an education. She maun be gien a chance in life.’
‘Forget it,’ James said. ‘It wad be a waste.’
But McSween was insistent, and finally, to shut him up, James Cameron agreed. It would keep the brat out of his sight for a few hours.
Lara was terrified by the idea of going to school. She had lived in a world of adults all her short life, and had had almost no contact with other children.
The following Monday, Big Bertha dropped her off at St Anne’s Grammar School, and Lara was taken to the principal’s office.
‘This is Lara Cameron.’
The principal, Mrs Cummings, was a middle-aged grey-haired widow with three children of her own. She studied the shabbily dressed little girl standing before her. ‘Lara. What a pretty name,’ she said smiling. ‘How old are you, dear?’
‘Six.’ She was fighting back tears.
The child is terrified, Mrs Cummings thought. ‘Well, we’re very glad to have you here, Lara. You’ll have a good time, and you’re going to learn a lot.’
‘I can’t stay,’ Lara blurted out.
‘Oh? Why not?’
‘My papa misses me too much.’ She was fiercely determined not to cry.
‘Well, we’ll only keep you here for a few hours a day.’
Lara allowed herself to be taken into a classroom filled with children, and she was shown to a seat near the back of the room.
Miss Terkel, the teacher, was busily writing letters on a blackboard.
‘A is for apple,’ she said. ‘B is for boy. Does anyone know what C is for?’
A tiny hand was raised. ‘Candy.’
‘Very good! And D?’
‘Dog.’
‘And E?’
‘Eat.’
‘Excellent. Can anyone think of a word beginning with F?’
Lara spoke up. ‘Fuck.’
Lara was the youngest one in her class, but it seemed to Miss Terkel that in many ways she was the oldest. There was a disquieting maturity about her.
‘She’s a small adult, waiting to grow taller,’ her teacher told Mrs Cummings.
The first day at lunch, the other children took out their colourful little lunch pails and pulled out apples and cookies, and sandwiches wrapped in wax paper.
No one had thought to pack a lunch for Lara.
‘Where is your lunch, Lara?’ Miss Terkel asked.
‘I’m not hungry,’ Lara said stubbornly. ‘I had a big breakfast.’
Most of the girls at school were nicely dressed in clean skirts and blouses. Lara had outgrown her few faded plaid dresses and threadbare blouses. She had gone to her father.
‘I need some clothes for school,’ Lara said.
‘Dae ye now? Weel, I’m nae made of money. Get yourself something frae the Salvation Army Citadel.’
‘That’s charity, Papa.’
And her father had slapped her hard across the face.
The children at school were familiar with games Lara had never even heard of. The girls had dolls and toys, and some of them were willing to share them with Lara, but she was painfully aware that nothing belonged to her. And there was something more. Over the next few years, Lara got a glimpse of a different world, a world where children had mothers and fathers who gave them presents and birthday parties and loved them and held them and kissed them. And for the first time, Lara began to realize how much was missing in her life. It only made her feel lonelier.
The boarding house was a different kind of school. It was an international microcosm. Lara learned to tell where the boarders came from by their names. Mac was from Scotland … Hodder and Pyke were from Newfoundland … Chiasson and Aucoin were from France … Dudash and Kosick from Poland. The boarders were lumbermen, fishermen, miners and tradesmen. They would gather in the large dining room in the morning for breakfast and in the evening for supper, and their talk was fascinating to Lara. Each group seemed to have its own mysterious language.
There were thousands of lumbermen in Nova Scotia, scattered around the peninsula. The lumbermen at the boarding house smelled of sawdust and burnt bark, and they spoke of arcane things like chippers and edging and trim.
‘We should get out almost two hundred million board feet this year,’ one of them announced at supper.
‘How can feet be bored?’ Lara asked.
There was a roar of laughter. ‘Child, board foot is a piece of lumber a foot square by an inch thick. When you grow up and get married, if you want to build a five-room, all wood house, it will take twelve thousand board feet.’
‘I’m not going to get married,’ Lara swore.
The fishermen were another breed. They returned to the boarding house stinking of the sea, and they talked about the new experiment of