My early childhood was spent on a farm. I was born in 1940, abandoned by both of my parents at the age of 6 months. My grandmother brought me to a family who lived on a farm. It was supposed to be a temporary situation but it was 19 years before I saw my mother again. I grew up in a family of roughhouse boys and I was 6 years old when a foster sister was born to my foster parents. We lived on a farm in a very rural area, no running water, no hydro and a wood burning cookstove and a coal burning heater were used to heat the old farmhouse. We had very little money but we never went hungry.

I remember attending a one-room school comprised of grades one to eight and walking home in the winter during a blizzard over frozen fields of snow, to come home to the smell of supper and the heat of the kitchen, finding a corner behind the cookstove to sit and warm up and yes to day-dream. The kitchen was lit by a coal-oil lamp which we were never allowed to touch. Other lamps were placed throughout the living room and the upstairs bedrooms.

In the winter time, the mailman delivered the mail using a horse and cutter. The road was never plowed during winter and it would be late spring before we could ever get our car (a model T) down the road and eventually down the lane to our farmhouse. To get groceries in the winter, my foster father would hook up a team of horses to a large sleigh and we would all climb on board for the trip into Blackstock, about 5 miles. Once we got onto the main road, a narrow road, we would sometimes encounter a car and although horses are supposed to have the right of way over vehicles, my foster father would always take the initiative and back up the team to a place where the car could get around us. Not easy to do, backing up a team of horses attached to a large sleigh.

In the summer time, we kids would always go barefoot, shoes were expensive and it wouldn't be until school started up again in September that we were faced with having to wear shoes again and go through the agony of blisters. The only time I injured myself going barefoot was when I ran down the middle of our laneway and stepped on a wasp's nest in the ground that was covered up by long grass. I did get stung quite a bit but my foster mother just took me down to the barnyard and packed mud on all the stings. It must have worked because I can't recall any adverse reaction to all the stings other than they were sore. During summer we kids had to help out on the farm, particularly

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