It seemed important enough to me, and the most important building, my father’s wholesale business down on Wharf Street. It was a deep warehouse with a deep smell. There was a black shield at the front with gold lettering that read: Wholesale Importers and Commission Merchants. Father’s little office was near the front door; he had a wicker armchair and sat at a table desk covered with green baize. There was a cupboard of pigeonholes at the back of the table, and beside was Father’s safe, on top of which was a letter press, an iron thing with a cross handle with two iron knobs which Father screwed down after he had laid one of his neatly written letters in it and somehow or other the letter was duplicated.
The window was shuttered halfway up so you could not look out into Wharf Street, which would have been interesting because of the great drays with fine horses passing back and forth. On the other side of Wharf Street in front of father’s store was a railing fence to help people from falling over into a great hollow place of bushes and wild land. Beyond that was the harbour and wharf. On the left of the wharf was the Customs House, square and brick.
Mr. Gregory and his wife lived under the steps of the Custom House, and Mr. Gregory had a beautiful garden. Their rooms and the garden were below the street level, and the back ran down to a wall of brick, and the water slapped on the wall and I liked it. Sometimes we went to see Mrs. Gregory.
Their living rooms opened on each side of a wide hallway which ran from the Gregorys’ front door under the main entrance to the Customs office to a runway right into the sea. I thought the Gregorys owned the Customs House and that they lived down there so that they could walk right into their garden and take a boat out the front hall if they wished, but later I learned they were the janitors.
On the other side of the wharf was a long, low, red-brick building which was the Hudson’s Bay trading store. It had small windows and long counters round the walls. They sold everything and had jars and blankets and boots and lanterns. There were always a lot of Indians squatting round the Hudson’s Bay store. Indians brought their canoes right up to plank landings here and there along the waterfront.
Just across the little harbour was the Songhees Indian Reserve. There were a lot of great flat-roofed community buildings with earth floors and long holes in the roof for smoke to escape. Indians did not use chimneys, they had bonfires on the floor. Travelling tribes used to camp on the Reserve beach. There were always glowing beach fires and canoes drawn up and tents on the sand or over canoes. I loved anything to do with Indians. The Reserve was a glory place for adventure to my imagination, but even had it not been cut off by water it was forbidden absolutely to children. But one could look across at it from Father’s store.
Father’s right-hand man was called Ross. He was tall and deaf and stupid. He had a square jaw and when he did say anything it was strained through a long moustache. He was all pepper and salt: clothes, hair, everything. He had a high desk and stool and was always writing in big books bound in grey leather and very substantial; they looked like Bibles and I don’t believe, even [if] they had not been Father’s business books, they could have lied or permitted anything false [to be] entered there.
Mr. Ross had two high stools he could sit on, but he preferred to stand on one leg with the loose one turned around the one that was fixed. There were two plain chairs for visitors; only people who had big business came to Father’s store. Father sold only by the case or the barrel or the gross. The store was filled to the high ceiling with cases and bales lettered in straight black letters, and what was in them was all mystery, though I suppose the great leather books knew, and the letter press and the pigeonholes were full of letters about where they came from and where they were going.
I think it would have taken a thousand me’s stood one on top of the other before the top of me would have reached them. The store was so deep; it was a long narrow walk between the boxes from the front door near the office to the back door that led into what Father called the yard, which was not a yard but a great rough shed with a high dirty window that let in only grey light, even on bright days.
The yard was piled with empties, packing cases and straw. It was a thick place with a smell as grey as the light, and in the dimness you never knew when you would meet green and yellow fireballs which were the eyes of Father’s cats. Father had dozens of cats to keep mice and rats away. He was very fond of his cats. Every morning he took a big bottle of milk to the store for the old mother and kitten cats.
There were always kittens peeping out of straw packaging in the yard. They were shy creatures and never came up to the office. It was so dark back in the store that rats might be expected night and day, and Father expected his cats [to work]. Neither he nor Ross sat long by the big round stove in the office toasting themselves. Nor did he expect the cats to.
Father was a man who turned his corners square. Nothing rounded or slurred. There was something I forgot in the store office. On a long shelf below Father’s and Ross’s desks there were shelves, and on them stood glass jars filled with Father’s English candy samples. After Father had gout, Mother used to send him a little stone jar of hot soup at noon. We liked to go down with the soup because one of the jars would come down and we got one of the candies. Tiny hard candy that would sit under your tongue for the entire mile’s walk home. The candy was always hard and pure and English.
One day, Alice and I went with Father’s soup, and while he was showing Ross about shipping boxes, we stood on his desk and stole some square acid drops out of a bottle. We did it very quietly and stuck them in our pockets and started home in a hurry. There were no pavements in Victoria; the streets were dirt and the sidewalks wood, generally two planks carried over the biggest rocks and deepest holes by trestles.
We hurried from the store, hoping Father would not reach for the acid drops bottle and notice how few were left in it. After we had passed the Customs House and were on the trestled walk, we came to a large pot hole. I do not know if it was my idea or hers, but the candies came out of our pockets and went one by one not into our mouths but down the pot hole.
There was really only one street in Victoria, Government. The shops were one storey high. I can only remember our stores. You went up sour, dirty stairs to R.B. Thompson, the dentist’s office. He had practised such a painful expression to seem sympathetic that [it] had become glued on his fat red face, and his nose had those lifted sides that mean bad smells.
My pretty big sister took me to Dr. Thompson’s to have a tooth drawn and I bit him, and because of his initials being R.B., I labelled him Royal Beast, which my sister said was wicked. Carts and buggies bumped along Government Street; the business part was only two blocks long,
The shops I can remember were a dry goods called Brown & White’s, a stationer called Hillen, Mr Spencer’s who had a dry goods and clothing, all sorts. Mr. Goodacre’s butcher shop. Sanders’ grocery, the post office, a tobacco shop called Campbell’s Corners with two bulletins where men read the news. Besides this there were dozens of saloons. The doors had sort of slat pinafores just high enough to hide men’s bodies and faces but not their shoes and shins. They didn’t latch. Men pushed and they shot in and slapped noisily shut.
I longed to see through these half doors but they shut too quickly and a smell of beer and sawdust came out that was horrid. It was strictly insisted that we always look the other way when passing a saloon. Perhaps that was the reason I wanted so hard to poke my head [in] and see what it was that these slat pinafores hid.
The naval base of Esquimalt was three miles out of Victoria. There were always men o’ war in Esquimalt harbour and there were always sailors coming out of the saloons. A few lesser streets branched out of Government: Bastion Street, where the courthouse stood, and Fort Street, which had a few smaller shops, Clay’s cake shop and Tippin’s fruit, which had very shiny apples polished on Mr. Tippin’s trouser leg, and Mrs. Laidlaw’s hat shop and a lot more saloons — the Beehive, the Bellmont and the Hub etc.
After one block, Fort Street turned residential. After she married, my sister had a house with a beautiful yellow plum tree, a black cherry tree [with] fruit that hung so high it only tantalized and could not be reached, and a verandah covered with a big vine. It was because my big sister married and went to live at the top of Fort Street and you had to go through town to visit her that I got my ambition and saw the other side of a saloon door.
I went to see my sister and was to come home by myself, the first time I had ever come through town alone. I felt important but a little frightened. Suddenly there was a tremendous shouting and dust and noise and barking of dogs. A great drove of cattle from the ranges in the upper country had landed at the wharf in front of Father’s store and were being driven over to Goodacre’s pastures and slaughterhouses at Cadboro Bay.
The animals were wild from the range and mad with fear of having been shipped. Men on horseback bewildered them by shouting and cattle dogs kept at their heels. The steers tore every which way, racing on the plank sidewalks and slipping into open ditches. Their hooves thundered on the walks and in the street, dust clouds blinded everything. I
was watching the dogs keeping the crazed cattle from entering people’s gates and into the store doors. They were almost upon me when I was caught up in the arms of a huge nigger man. “I’ll take care of you, li’l gal,” he said, and swerving backwards through the swinging doors carrying me with him, he sat me down on the bar among all the shiny taps and bottles.
And there I sat with my legs dangling and wondering which I wanted to see most — the bad inside of a saloon or the excitement of the frantic cattle. When the cattle were past, I dashed home. “Where do you suppose I have been? With a nigger right inside a saloon. I sat among the bottles and saw the man polishing up the taps, but I hated the smell. I don’t like saloons.”
