THIS OLD HOUSE

by Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca

While my father was serving overseas during WWII his grandfather passed away and left him a house on Brier Island. By the time Dad returned from the War he was a newly married man and in need of a place to live, unfortunately, by this time the house had been sitting empty for a while and had deteriorated somewhat. Like almost every other house on the Island, it had been built on sloping land, facing towards the harbour with the front supported by a four-foot stone foundation and the back of the house sitting on the ground. This resulted in the back sills rotting out and the kitchen floor dropping about six inches. Since his new bride would be arriving in a few weeks, Dad got to work fixing the old place up, replacing the sills and levelling the floor. It occurred to him that indoor plumbing might be a nice touch too, so a pantry off the kitchen was converted into a bathroom and Dad put the metal-working skills he had picked up in the Army to use building his own zinc-lined shower stall. This was the house in which I was born and where I lived for the first fifteen years of my life.

This old house, which was already old when I was born there over sixty years ago, was in many ways a good example of a typical Island home. It wasn’t a fancy house; in fact, the only thing about it that could be considered even remotely fancy was the decorative pressed-tin ceiling in the front room; the rest of the house was what you might call plain but practical. It was a square house with eight rooms, four downstairs and four upstairs, equally divided on either side of a central hall and stairway. Someone looking at our house from out front would see four front room windows, two on either side of a front door that I can’t remember ever being used; everyone went in and out through the porch door at the back of the house. Because of the way the roof sloped down to just above the living room windows, this observer might think that he was looking at a single-story home, but in fact there were two second-story windows at each end of the house, one for each bedroom.

Because they were tucked up close to the roof, all of the bedrooms had sloping walls, this made it difficult to stand up in places but still they were roomy enough. My own room was on the north end of the house and from my window I could see across the harbour to Fish Point. There was a streetlight on my side of the house and at night the light shining through the tree at the bottom of Stanley’s lane threw constantly moving shadowy designs on my bedroom wall. In the summertime it sometimes got warm up in those rooms, although that wasn’t usually a big problem in Westport; it was in the winter that you really noticed the lack of insulation and central heating in the old place.

On many a winter’s night I could feel the draft all the way across the room as the wind rattled and whistled in around my window. If it was an exceptionally cold night, Dad would spread an Army greatcoat over my bed for extra warmth. After reading in bed for a while I would dread having to get out of the warm nest I had made to turn off the bare bulb that hung from a cord in the middle of my room. Eventually I tied a string from the bulb to my bedpost so all I had to do was stick one arm out into the cold to turn off the light. In the morning, if the wind had been from the North, my window would be all frosted up and there might be a snowdrift on the inside sill or even on the floor below the window. Getting out of a nice warm bed in the morning could be a challenge; hitting that ice-cold linoleum with my bare feet was not something I looked forward to. Often I would just leap out of bed, grab my clothes and rush downstairs to change beside the living room oil stove that struggled to provide heat for the whole house.

Even though our family was steadily growing and we could use the space, for some reason we only used half of our main-floor rooms. The house had either been built to be a two-family home, or it had been converted at some point, either way, it had two kitchens and two living rooms. For a few years my grandparents lived in the other side of the house. My grandfather had been a baker in Holland and I still remember the wonderful smell of his just-out-of-the-oven raisin bread coming from the kitchen across the hall. After they moved away, the front room was turned into a playroom for us kids and the kitchen became a storage area for various odds and ends.

We probably used that room for storage because we didn’t have a basement to put things in. The house was built on a stone foundation that provided just a crawl-space under it. If you really needed to get under there, there was a small door in the foundation wall that you could crawl through. The only other way to get under the house was by going into the root cellar. In the front hall beside the stairs was a square patch cut into the linoleum, beneath this was a hatch in the floor and a short set of steep stairs leading to a small, stone-walled, dirt-floored room. I didn’t mind going down into the root cellar in the early fall after Dad had wrestled several bags of potatoes and a barrel of apples down there, then it was kind of nice, the scent of the apples and potatoes, the bags of onions and boxes of turnips and squash all combined to overpower the naturally musty, damp-earth smell and gave me a secure feeling that we were well prepared for the coming winter.

A few months later it was a different story. By spring the odour down those stairs was a strong blend of rotting fruit and vegetables combined with the winter-long dampness of earth that had never seen the sun. Reaching into the dark bottom of the apple barrel with great reluctance, I could anticipate the feeling of my fingers breaking through the skin of a decaying Macintosh; the half-deflated bag of potatoes in the corner would have ghostly-looking pale white tendrils growing through the burlap and would be stained with rancid smelling, black, rotten potato juice. The spongy, slimy onions would be competing with the potatoes to see who could grow the longest sprouts and any squash left would be sitting in a row with their heads slowly caving in; of course the turnips, the vegetable that I liked the least, survived the winter in pretty good condition if you overlooked the places where the mice had nibbled on them.

One spring day, Roger Denton and I were sitting out front of this house with my new Daisy Lever Action BB gun shooting at cans and bottles lined up on the breastwork across the road. To cock the gun after every shot, you had to swing down the lever under the trigger and then pull it back up again. Because it was new, the spring that was being reset with this action was very stiff and Roger had difficulty performing this action. He tried several different ways of cocking the gun and found that putting the barrel over his shoulder pointing backward allowed him to pull down the lever. The second or third time he did this, he must have accidently held the trigger down because as soon as he cocked the gun it fired. The BB went through one of the living room windows, across the room and bounced off the far wall above the couch just a few inches from the nose of my father who was having a little lie-down before going back to work. By the time he got to the window to see the source of this missile, Roger was well on his way home and all my Father saw in the front yard was me holding my Daisy Lever Action and trying my best to look as innocent as I actually was.

We moved out of this house when I was fifteen and a few years later my father sold it to Mrs. Ripton from New York to use as a summer home. Since then, the old place has been renovated inside and out, it even has a full basement under it now, but I know that deep down in its wooden bones all my memories are still there and that it is still the same old house that I grew up in.