This story is entirely a product of an interview that I conducted with my grandmother, the Milly of this story. It is a fictionalized reimagination of true facts and actual happenings. No scene in this story is my invention. My inventions are the circumstances that place the scenes, circumstances that are meant to be constructions of the fictionalized narrator’s memory. I speculate in what circumstance the true events had occurred. Know that every character individualized in this story is or was, at some point or another, a physical reality in this world.
“Ashland, Massachusetts, Home of the Electric Clock!” – that was where the duplex was. Mind you, Mr. Henry E. Warren – that prosperous man to whom all credit of said clock’s creation goes – no longer produces these electrically sustained time pieces. For one, he is no longer counted among the company of living persons, as he is dead; such a state is often a hindrance when one wishes to continue thriving as a businessman. Regardless, the electric clock is passé: a bygone technology in our digital age. So, really, to say “Ashland, Massachusetts, Home of the Electric Clock!” I am being quite old hat. Might I bring us back, though, round to the point at which we must concentrate: the duplex; for in this duplex when Mr. Warren’s Telechron Electric Clock was very much new hat, a little girl named Milly lived, a girl whose story is worth telling.
On this shiveringly frigid wintry night on which we first focus, Milly was just about ready to be bundled up tight in her blankets to sleep. There was no heat in the house – it was the Depression, after all. Only a solitary fire crackled in the downstairs.
“There you go, Milly,” her mother said as she walked briskly away from Milly’s bed, taking with her the cloth full of fire-heated bricks that had been resting on top to woollywarm it. She was a quiet woman, her mother and hard working, certainly no mistake in that: she quit school in 7th grade to work and make money after her father died. She was about average height – or short, I suppose by today’s standards – and had short brown hair that came down in waves to just past her ears. Milly thanked her mother as was appropriate and laid down on her comfortable, newly-warmed sheets with one last vigorous shiver, wrapping herself fast so that no gaps allowed a single strand of cold air in. She slept soundly, as sound as the cold allowed her to sleep.
Let it be known now that Ashland, Massachusetts during the Depression was very much like any other town of that era. Plain paved roads and plain green lawns sat in front of plain wooden houses, with a brick schoolhouse here and a smoke-stacked factory there. People kept gardens and built up houses – what else would they do without jobs? – and children played games in the street. Milly’s family did all of these things and was just the same as most other families. And this, my dear readers, is why her story is worth telling: she was just the same. How wonderful! Just the same as everyone else in her French-Canadian neighborhood – except for the French part – and yet so extraordinary: yes, that is what makes her story extraordinary.
And so extraordinarily her mother kept a garden and her father built up the duplex and she played games like Robin Hood in the street (Oh, Robin Hood! Robin of Loxley! Robyn the Hode, that prude outlaw, that gode yeman! Their game so honored his youthful charm!). She would play that at the top of the hill near the duplex with all of her neighborhood friends, and how they would have fun!
“1…2…3…4…” all the way up to ten some boy – or girl, but in this particular case a boy – would count, he and two others (the Robins) with their eyes closed. The rest (the Merry Men and Women if you will) with Milly in their company would run and giggle and hide little paper notes in the trees. They would stick them to the bark, pin them like Robin and his Merry Men would but without the arrows – they were far too young for arrows. How fun for them! The notes could say anything – anything at all. There were no insults, of course – how could there be? The children were Merry!
“…9…10!” he would scream in elation. All the rest who hid their notes ran back to the street, giggling all the way, out of breath, but giggling just the same, the three counters erratically rastening into the woods to find the papers.
The note hiders would stand attentive at the road, waiting until one of the searchers shouted, “I found one!” and run out of the woods to show the spoils of his woodland hunt. Each of the three would come out after all that was hidden was found, at which time they all had a raucular time orating the notes they held. Who won these games? Well, the one who came out of the woods first, I suppose. But how can one ever tell with children and their imaginations? They played and they had fun and that was all that mattered to them. It was the Depression, after all.
Can any of you imagine the sophisticated ten-year-olds of today, them and their gadgets with every sort of frill and flounce imaginable, playing Robin Hood in the trees with paper notes? Certainly not! I grant you, some would and they would be joyous. But for hours those Merry Children would play! Hours upon hours of running back and forth, giggling prodigiously until their stomachs were all knotted with aches! The whole forest was their playground and they saw it first-hand, not through a screen. Children today: do they bother with the forest; with that wondrous analog technology known as pencil and paper? Few questions are as doubtless as these[1].
But I must not now be unfairly digressive. Let us now return to the next morning in the life of our protagonist, Milly. She had woken up early, 6 or 7 AM it must have been, to get to school for the day, and it was bitingly cold out. Her bed, no longer warm from the hot brick, left her no other choice than to be curled up as tightly as a ball of yarn so as to keep her feet from turning a blue-violet during the night. She sprang out of bed as one does in the coldest weather, hastily bustling to dress herself appropriately for the coming day in the clothes that her mom laid out the night before.
Milly was short, always was and always will be, and quiet much like her mother and, indeed, her father, the hard workers that they were. She was a thin girl, and had blue eyes and wore her hair very much like her mother’s. Her posture was unassuming and slight, and, consequently, she was very often the most reserved of her friends. She did, of course, take part in the games in her physical education class and play Robin Hood, so she was no introvert. Rather, she was content. What else would she be with such a life? She would never complain, whinge, or whine: this kind of bleating is a privilege for the upper classes. She had no notion of her family’s impecunious state[2] and even if she did, it would not matter. They lived simply and they were happy. Besides, everyone else was just as poor[3].
Milly, awake and dressed, came clip clopping down the stairs for breakfast – oatmeal it was this morning. Her mother and father were already up, ready to work for the day, her mother scurrying to send the kids off to school and her father preparing for work around the house with a healthy portion of breakfast. She was there with her siblings, Ada, Virginia, and Arthur, all of them packing their bags to prepare for their day’s studies. After every bowl was cleared and the children were properly full, Milly and her siblings walked to school. They certainly had no car to drive to the school, for these were the early days of automobiles, and few of these poor families could afford such an extraordinary investment. And so they walked. Not very far did they walk, for how far, really, is a town school from one’s house, especially in those simple days? The elementary school was an especially quick jaunt for Milly when she was of that age, the brick schoolhouse being just across the street from the duplex.
Now, I won’t bother you with the particulars of Milly’s school day, since the only thought more miserable than a child’s contempt for school is an adult’s fear of returning to it. I will simply say that she had a time at school, and a time is all she had. I would surmise that she herself would not remember the kind of time that she had on that particular day, as old age wears on the memory as much as rust wears on an old metal jug. Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose as Gertrude said, and so school is nothing other than school and that’s the he and the she of it. What could be more banal?
Past her time at school now, Milly spent a couple of hours of playing by the hill near the duplex and worked for a short time on her homework. She, her two older sisters, her younger brother, and her two much older parents then sat down at the dinner table for that great nighttime meal known to so many as supper. Lamb chops, potatoes, and broccoli with some bread on the side were the meal for this evening. They ate and ate with the clinking sound of silverware and the plunking sound of smacked plates the only audible features of the mealtime. This was not because they were silenced from the sensational pleasure of a great meal; it was an average meal, in fact, a rather normal evening dining experience for any family, rich or poor. Curiously, they made not a peep because they had nothing to say. I have mentioned that both Milly and her mother were especially quiet people, and surely I was not telling the whole truth when I disinclined to mention that the entire family was reticent. Rarely was a story told at that dinner table! Of course, they had no derision for each other. They were all very amicable people and had the good fortune of getting along well with one another. You may have never known it from spending one dinnertime with them, but they were all deeply passionate for one another. Truly, they cared, and they had the good and proper sense to eat their supper together as a family every evening. Laconic though they were, a “How was your day?” answered only by a “Good,” and no more, goodness knows that words are not the only way to express our affection to our loved ones. They ate together, and this is more than many can claim to have experienced with their own families.
And so with dinner through and the cold air rearing, sleep was again very nearly upon our extraordinary Milly. Out of her dayclothes and into her nightclothes, she waited patiently for the bricks to again be lifted off the top of her bed. And again her mother came briskly by to stow away the bricks, and after her job was done and Milly was climbing into her snug and toasty bed, she called out, “Good night! Sleep tight!” as only mothers can do. And with that and withal, Milly slept and all of her family slept, with not a whit of heat to warm them through the night. Such was the life of jobless families, and such was the life for Milly and for her parents and for her siblings and for all who lived in those times. Life must have been hard, but life was also grand. Life was happy and life was simple. No family could have lived more caringly and more lovingly. As for keeping up with the Joneses? There were no Joneses at all to keep up with! It was the Depression, after all.
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[1] A note on parenting to the parents who may be reading this: children are pliant and impressionable, and one can observe definite consequences from their constant use of modern entertainment technology. Their attention spans fall remarkably far as their minds are distended from overstimulation. They are impoverished of real knowledge and careful thought as a consequence of their lack of concentration, and, inevitably, are deprived of the pleasure of contemplation. Parents – well, let us be honest, many of you – have rather ridiculously misapplied their efforts in this regard. The meaning of “providing for children” in our hedonistic society is dramatically different from its meaning of many moons ago, and we are worse off because of it. A guardian? He is now consumerism’s dutiful vassal rather than the child’s protector and teacher. He should know better. Children should be able to live without constant stimuli, without perpetual connection to the outside world and parents should ensure that this is the case. What would I have you do, exactly? Well, you should regulate your children’s exposure to technology so that they can reclaim the joys of real imagination. Of course, you all don’t believe me, but you will come to understand in the fullness of time.
[2] And poor her family was. For a time, her mother was the only one with a job, and though steady it was, frequent it was not: she would clean the house next door where an elderly woman lived once or twice a week. Her father kept busy with the duplex, fixing up the originally intolerably steep stairs, installing a bathroom, and generally maintaining it for livability. As an absolute fact, Milly’s two older sisters would eventually both secure jobs in Mr. Warren’s company before their father.
[3] Later in her life, Milly would come to remember this simple life and look at it with joy. “We were poor, but we were happy,” she would say. Ignorance was then, in her case, unforgettably blissful.
