Western Walkabout: The Good Old Days?
...When Richard Harris's father left England to work on a wheat property in Saskatchewan he had to harness teams of horses to plough the land. He worked for a tiny salary and his sustenance. When he received his first month's pay, the farmer, Mr Joe Slattery, a soldier settler, had deducted his funeral expenses...
If you think these times are hard, read Richard Harris's story then realise things could be much worse.
To read more of Richard's columns please click on http://www.openwriting.com/archives/western_walkabout/
My father was a kind man from hard times. He left school at 14 to work as a boy porter on the railway on the North Durham coalfields for a salary of one penny a week, plus tips. Going home on a Friday night, he gave it all to his mother to help her feed the family.
After the 1914-18 War, and following some basic training in horticulture and animal husbandry, father went to Canada under the Empire Settlement Scheme, and worked on a wheat property in Saskatchewan near the border of an Indian reservation.
He had to harness teams of horses to plough the land. He worked for a tiny salary and his sustenance. When he received his first month's pay, the farmer, Mr Joe Slattery, a soldier settler, had deducted his funeral expenses.
"We're a long way from civilisation here, son," Mr Slattery said. "If anything happens to you, I'll have the expense of burying you." Mr Slattery said he'd have to buy father proper boots because his English boots had nails in the soles and the Canadian cold would enter his feet through the nails.
One day when Father was ploughing, a shadow fell across him. It was an Indian on a horse. He had no English but mimed cattle to Father, with horns and lowing. He was looking for the reservation's beef, which had gone walkabout. Father said he hadn't seen them.
He resigned from Mr Slattery's spread but was arrested for sleeping out in a park and held overnight in jail. The following morning, the magistrate ordered him deported back to England as an "undesirable alien."
"I have to do it for you, son," the magistrate said. "If we don't deport you, you'll not survive the Canadian winter."
