ASPIRATION: 25 Beggars and Dudes and Strangers on the Make

Clear Lake, Riding Mountain National Park, Manitoba, Canada

Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.

-Gustav Flaubert

Another excursion was planned for the July long weekend. Perhaps ‘planned’ is not quite the right word. The intention, in any case, was to camp over the weekend at Clear Lake in Riding Mountain National Park, about 150 miles from Winnipeg. Preparations made, we veterans of Deadwood, South Dakota, set off with Fred in his car this time, loaded with a tent, sleeping bags and six cases of beer. As each case contained twenty-four bottles, we hoped we had enough to last the weekend.

We had no food, though.

Heading west from Winnipeg on Highway 1, we turned north after Portage la Prairie onto Highway 16, the ‘Yellowhead Route’, and at Minnedosa we turned north onto Highway 10. Drawing on our ready supply of refreshment, dispensed by the back seat passengers, we sipped unfortunately warm, frothy beer, while sailing along the highway, joking, laughing and intoning snatches of song. But suddenly, a black car loomed by the roadside and a man stepped onto the tarmac with an arm in the air. He was wearing a khaki uniform and a brown broad-brimmed hat.

We were stopped somewhere on this part of Highway 10

Now, this incident occurred in those halcyon days some years before the ban on drinking and driving was imposed, but even at that time Manitoba had a statute that forbade the carriage of alcohol in a car. You could stow it in the trunk, yes, but not where the driver and passengers sat. At first sight of the law, we concealed the bottles we had in our hands, but there, behind the front seat, propped on the prop shaft hump sat a big cardboard box, bulging with beer bottles.

Fred pulled off the road and stopped. The Mountie stepped round to the driver’s window and asked without preamble whose beer it was.

“We all chipped in for it,” some bright spark said.

“Well, do you want me to charge all of you?” was the reply.

We all swapped foxy looks then and adopted poker faces until out of the blue my brother Ian agreed to take the rap. When we got back to Winnipeg, we all chipped in for the twenty-five dollar fine save Fred, as he’d bought fuel.

But how was it known we possessed any beer in the first place? We learned later that a second sleuth had been slithering on his belly in the grass somewhere on the roadside pressing a pair of binoculars to his eyes.

Gateway, Riding Mountain National Park,
early 1960s by the look of the flag

The campsite just outside the tiny town of Wasagaming was densely occupied – as it was every year on the July long weekend, so we’d heard – by hordes of young weekenders, mostly lads accompanied by astronomical quantities of beer, but actually in search of another kind of accompaniment, the courage for which they hoped to acquire by means of the astronomical quantities of beer. But it was a strange strategy they employed. They lounged at picnic tables surrounded by brown bottles for half the day and most of the evening, now laughing, now talking, now arguing, now commiserating with one another, or sometimes just staring blankly into space, and then they’d vomit and pass out. They knew how to enjoy themselves, these canny Manitobans!

It’s a good bet that most people throughout the world think it’s the job of the R.C.M.P. just to ride around on black horses while wearing red jackets. But they don’t wear red jackets for work. Probably because we’d be forewarned when they were indulging their nefarious practices, as when Ian wandered out with a bear onto the gravel access road in front of our tent. A Mountie appeared from nowhere, grabbed the bottle from his hand and administered another fine. For you see, another Manitoba law prevents the consumption of alcohol in a public place. Our pitch, it seems, was a private area, because we had rented it. However, the road in front was a public place.

I often yearned to be back in

England

in those days, but especially at times like that.

What lads won’t do for a laugh! At some point during the weekend our money ran out and somebody (Fred or Jim maybe) suggested we try begging for our bread. At that, Jim and Fred began accosting holiday-makers on the street in Wasagaming, attempting to put the bite on them.

“Oh, sir, sir, could you give us some money for something to eat? A quarter, a dime – anything – we’re starving!”

Nobody could be starving in a tourist town like Wasagaming, but many young men thus petitioned smiled at the antics of this pair of amateur panhandlers and, possibly tickled too by the title of ‘sir’, made a donation. Jim showed the most aptitude for this shamming, I recall, falling on his knees, for instance, and even shuffling along behind like a dwarf and tugging at his sleeve when the victim attempted to escape.

“Go for the ones with girls,” he advised. “They’re too ashamed to refuse.”

The others joined in this trawl of the town’s visitors with different degrees of zeal and success, but I suffered this sacrifice of pride just once before giving it up. I’d have to be hungry enough to eat the tourists themselves before I could beg from them.

As the proceeds of this beggar’s bazaar came to a couple of dollars or more, the swag was carried to a café to restore our amour-propre as paying customers for a round of hamburgers and chips. At the end of the meal, Jim collected the money and picked up the bill while we others stepped outside.

“How much was it?” I asked when he rejoined us.

“Run!” he said. “I didn’t pay!”

Campsite at Wasagaming

Back in Winnipeg, Jim and I got jobs working as labourers for the City of Winnipeg, since workers were taken on every summer to build roads. The work was back-breaking, as you had to shovel concrete all day long, but Jim showed little aptitude for that. He quit after four days.

In August Ian and I rebelled at the prospect of roosting unceasingly in a mouldering ruin and moved to a modern one-bedroom apartment on Edmonton Street. The place was well-appointed and respectable-looking, the sort of place you wouldn’t be ashamed to bring a girl back to, and that’s exactly what I did one night. I can’t recall where I met her but she was a blonde girl, a tall and pretty girl, and her name was Sherine. I’d got hold of the bedroom that night – Ian could sleep on the sofa bed in the living room – and Sherine made no objection when I led her into the bedroom. She made no objection either when I settled her on the double bed in there and kissed and caressed her and began to undress her. My heart raced at the sight of her smooth white body. Was I about to possess – really possess, I mean – a woman at last?

This was no one-night stand, as we’d passed a few evenings in each other’s company and I sensed that Sherine was conceiving an attachment for me. But at the critical moment I failed to perform again. True, the situation was not ideal, for the living room was occupied by friends and they could be heard talking. Our privacy was not really complete, and I was thinking about that, but it was really only a minor distraction. The core of the problem was that I just could not stop thinking. In the light of later experience I learned that thoughts are the last thing you want at a time like that. What is wanted is not thought, just a simple response. An emotional response. The flesh was willing enough in my case, it seemed, but the spirit was weak, dominated as it was by constant pondering on cognitive problems.

In plain words, I simply thought too much. Somehow, in the course of my development, my intellect had grown to prodigious proportions, like a cuckoo in a warbler’s nest, sapping my energies and stunting my other functions. It was not only a ceaselessly busy intellect but a demanding one too, that even sought its own mate in the form of an intellectual woman. At that time I was naïve enough to believe in the possibility of finding for myself an ‘ideal woman’, at once beautiful and clever – like Melissa! But Sherine, despite her prettiness and her patient good nature, lacked animation and conversation. Despite her attractiveness, I felt that we were just not well-matched.

United College, now the University of Winnipeg

As university admission policy, I knew, was being liberalised in those days, it was with fingers crossed that I approached the enrolment desk at what was then still known as United College early in September, hoping to be accepted on the basis of my present qualifications. To my profound disappointment, my application was refused on the grounds that I’d failed to complete matriculation. It would be another year now before I could hope to attend university, and in the meantime I would have to attack again that troublesome Grade XII Literature course I was lacking and get a pass in it.

I consoled myself for this blow by persuading Jim to accompany me on a hitch-hiking trip to Vancouver, as he was not yet due to resume lectures for another week or more.

Trans Canada Highway in the Rockies of

British Columbia

Just one memory remains with me of the trip west. Somewhere in Alberta we thumbed a lift with a fellow in a cowboy hat behind the wheel of a pick-up truck. He had a ranch somewhere in the province, he told us, and he was from Blackpool, of all places! At dusk, he pulled off the road somewhere in the mountains and stopped. Hopping out, he then lifted a horse’s saddle and a grey woollen blanket from the back of his truck. He placed the saddle on the ground and laid himself out on his back with his head propped on it. Then he opened the blanket out over himself, tucked it up under his chin, tipped his hat down over his eyes and settled for sleep like an old cowhand from the Rio Grande.

Jim and I prepared for sleep by squeezing into our sleeping bags in the back of the wagon. As we were now in the mountains, the temperature diminished quickly, and half an hour afterwards the Blackpool cowboy got up from the ground and bundled himself with his blanket and saddle into the cab.

Next morning, Jim and I remained in our sleeping bags when the truck took off down the road and, snug inside them with our heads propped against the cab, we beheld the mountains all around rising from their shadows into sunlight as the road unrolled behind.

Where the Blackpool cowboy dropped us off, I’ve forgotten, but as we said goodbye to him, I mused humorously that he wasn’t a real cowboy at all. He was just a dude.

Lions Gate Bridge, Vancouver

That evening I recall sipping a bottle of beer with Jim in some Vancouver drinking den, when a passing patron of the place, noting our bags, said:

“Are you guys from out of town?”

When I said yes, he joined us at our table. This wasn’t really a very lively place, he told us. He knew of a better one. Would we like to go with him there? He seemed a friendly and genuine sort, so we agreed to go. His recommended place wasn’t very far away, just a couple of minute’s drive in his car. On arrival, we took a table and then he asked us to order a drink, while he went off to get some cigarettes. But he failed to return before the waiter had to be paid. That aroused my suspicion, but I did not grudge the fellow a drink on us, since he’d brought us here.

But later, returning from the gents myself to find the fellow absent again, I voiced my suspicions to Jim. Jim told me then he’d just lent him a dollar! This convinced me we were being taken for a ride. We needed to get rid of him, I said. Jim agreed and suggested we just leave.

“What about the dollar?” I asked.

Jim just shrugged.

It was his money, not mine, but I wouldn’t leave it at that. This moocher was making goons of us.

“We’ll get it back,” I said.

When our freeloading host came back, I said:

“Okay, you’ve had a free drink on us. Just give us back our dollar and we’ll call it quits.”

I was uneasy. What if he got aggressive? Not likely, I reasoned, as he was smaller than me and there were two of us. He promptly got his wallet out and handed back the note. I told him we were leaving now and he offered us a lift back to the place we’d come from! Had we done him an injustice after all? But I was determined to depart. I just didn’t trust him.

The episode made me revise my ideas about my friend, Jim. He’d always professed to be nobody’s fool, since he’d grown up in a rougher part of the North End than I had. But he'd just now handed over a dolour to a complete stranger, simply because he was asked for one! And now, after hearing my suspicions about this swindler, whose company we had done nothing to seek, he'd rejected any attempt to get his dollar back. Jim was often fond of ventilating his views on right and wrong. But this affair confirmed that his chatter was entirely theoretical, and that it lacked any real conviction that would give it any meaning in reality!

For lack of anywhere else, we slept in a lumber yard that night. The following day, as planned, we met Margaret and Marilyn (who had recently broken with Wayne) at the house of some relative of Margaret’s, whose address she’d given us. We two travellers were allocated beds in the basement, I recall, and we’d just got settled into them in the shadows down there when Margaret and Marilyn crept down in their nighties. Marilyn, recently disengaged from Wayne, made straight for Jim, who’d put out the welcome mat for her back in Winnipeg, while Margaret stretched herself like a cat on my bed for another session of tepid kissing. Tepid on her part, that is. And she vanished when things got too hot.

The old hometown shed shadows of even greater monotony after a week on the road. I decided I’d had enough of it. I just couldn’t face another year – another winter! – in Winnipeg before starting university. There was also the question of what to do about Sherine. I felt we were just mismatched, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her that, so I opted for the same solution I’d chosen with Christine. After enrolling for a correspondence course in Grade XII Literature and securing the relevant texts, I bought an airline ticket for London and flew off within the week.