Chapter 7

7 at first. We tried to start to live an ordinary life, but without a kitchen it was difficult.
   We managed to get a sort of sleep with the kids sleeping across the bed for a while , it was still middle of the day so for us to retire for the day was not to be .We rigged up a sort of table out of the big “America” trunk and used the suitcases to sit on . We went and bought “ready made foods” almost immediately because we needed to have something to eat and drink. There was a “drugstore across the street and we went there and got some supplies, mainly pop and cookies, I think. My memory fails me as to the details of that first day together, but one thing I remember is that I was happy as a lark in the springtime.
    Here is were I will mention that one of the first things I did was to introduce my family to the Erikssons in Burnaby, because they had been waiting anxiously to meet my family as we had developed a real solid friendship, so we took the bus and went and visited  them and they would invariable drive us home in their new “Mercury” car, and occasionally they would drive us someplace, and later help us driving home stuff we bought that we couldn’t take on the streetcar or bus.
    It was winter, end of November and Christmas only three weeks away and time to think about what type of Christmas we were to give the kids so obviously we started to go and visit the big department stores, like Eaton’s, Woodward’s, Hudson’s Bay and Simpson Sears. Then there were the stores we could afford to buy thing from, such as “Army and Navy”, Zeller’s, Woolworths, called “nickel and dime” stores. I haven’t got a clue as to what we ended up buying for the kids for Christmas, after all, at time of writing its
56 years ago. Those little kids are now ready to retire, WOW, time flies.
   The Christmas was celebrated in our two “empty rooms” but we had a very small Christmas tree. On Christmas Day we took the bus to “Stanley Park” (11000 acres) and walked through the park, I wanted to show them the pride of Vancouver, besides it didn’t cost anything. We walked through the park across the Lyons Gate bridge to Marine drive through the “Indian Reserve “ on the north shore all the way to the ferry landing at the foot of Lonsdale avenue., in North Vancouver. It was snow slush all the way and I had only ordinary shoes and remember my feet getting wet and cold but had to keep going. Once there we took the ferry to Vancouver and I think it landed at Water street and Abbott street and from there we took the “McDonald“  bus home to our rooms. It had been a long walk and everybody was tired even I.
After all the kids were 3 1/2 and 5 1/2 years old. It had taken us all day. Next day was to be Marianas birthday. I don’t remember if I had a cake for her or not, not even if I had bought her any gift.
    We stayed in this house till after Christmas, about February, when the landlady informed me she needed the rooms for her daughter because the daughter was getting married. I was sort of relieved but also at a loss of what to do right then. The real reason we had to move was ( I think)
She had come in to the room we used for sleeping and right inside the door by the light switch, Roly had gotten hold of a very small screwdriver ( think it was ) and punched a bunch of holes in the drywall, she also figure we used too much electricity using the hotplate for cooking. Anyway we started to look for another place and that is when we found a small apartment near Anna-Lisa Eriksson, whom I mentioned had a daughter working for the Swedish Press. It was managed by a Norwegian who lived across the hall the rent was reasonable. Luckily there was that big bed again no other furniture but there was a Kitchen and an “ice-box” to put a block of ice in now and then. If my memory doesn’t fail me I think there also was a small kitchen table. It was very close to Christina’s birthday and as we had thought of giving Roly A puppy for his but couldn’t have one where we lived at the time we agreed to give it to him on Christinas birthday. I don’t remember what we gave Christina, But I took the bus out to New Westminster (Burnaby border) to someone named “Digney” (owned a Racetrack out there “Digney speedway”) and bought a “Great Dane” puppy for $50.00. I brought it home under my coat and on the street car. I had located it through an ad in the Vancouver Sun news paper. (One must remember that my take home pay was about $35.00 a week and the rent $40.00 a month) It was a lot of money but under the circumstances, Kids not speaking English, having no friends, yet, a “crummy” place to live, I thought it would be nice for them to have a “playmate”, Anyway we named him “Flash”, after the Great Dane we had in Malmö. He ate my socks and “pooed” all over the place and did not like to go down the stairs to go outside for a pee but wet all over the place. It was embarrassing to have him. So who came to our rescue but Norma Eriksson and her mom Hidur, they came visiting on a Sunday forenoon and wondered if we would be interested in renting a small house out in the “country” North Burnaby to be exact. They drove us out there and there it was,-our “dream home” for $30.00 a month plus one acre of land, a little less than half a hectare. Oh boy where we in luck!?
  We definitely said YES!
   And we moved again. This time we had help moving all our stuff. Norma and her friend “Audry” using her mom’s car, took care of a lot of it and the dog
  The Norwegian caretaker-manager wasn’t very happy because we had only lived there about a month. We were happy because for one thing we lived on the second floor facing the busy street of “Broadway with a tram stop right outside our window, as well there was a bit of a down hill right there so when the tram was to stop it had to put the breaks on quite severely and boy did that make noise
  As it where we got moved to the country with a small house, one big room as front room-kitchen combo and one small room for sleeping, same big bed with a terrible mattress which eventually gave me a permanent backache.
It had a small but good and clean bathroom with a shower. There was a new garage a huge Peach tree, oodles of raspberry, strawberries and corn already planted as well as millions of daffodils which bloomed in the spring to our amazement and delight. It was early April (or May) when we moved there and about the same time I had some difficulties at work, the difficulties was mainly that I had to take the Hotel to court over my wages. It was shortly after I was promoted to roast cook or “head fry-cook that the chef hires his nephew as my helper-assistant but unknown to me gave him my salary (hourly rate) and I was cheated out of about $49.00 which was about a weeks pay in those days. The sous-chef, Tony, brought it to my attention as it was him who handed out the cheques and he looked at it and saw the discrepancy, he was also our “union representative” so he brought it up to the “union’s attention and they took it from there. At first the hotel tried to settle for giving me $13.00 but I refused to settle for that and we threatened to go to court over it. On recommendation from Tony I went across the street and applied for work at Hotel Vancouver, which I got after Chef Scarabeli asked me to make an omelette.All he said, to the Sous-Chef (Laracine): Hire him! That was it I got my $49.00, The Chef at Hotel Georgia (Arthur Munger) got fired. So it was not a bad deal I got my money and a better job as well, I liked it at Hotel Vancouver ended up staying five years or more.
   Mariana and Roly and Christina had begun to settle in as “new Canadians” and were making friends with our new neighbors and their kids. Now everybody was happy!
   The house we rented was small but adequate. The garden turned out to be a blessing as it had a lot of produce growing, both fruit and vegetables. The dog loved it , the kids loved it , the neighbors turned out to very good neighbors and Mariana made new and good friends .
   While we lived in this small little house we had visitors that came all the way from Vancouver to see us, “Den Långe” (John), Anna-Lisa Eriksson and her two daughters,
Gus, Hildur and Norma Eriksson’s  and low and behold some one from Sweden showed up, it was a friend of Gertrud, my brother Bertils wife; it was Gunnar and Ebba Hellström. They had also immigrated to Canada and looked us up as soon as they arrived. They had gotten the address from Gertrud. As she was fluent in English they had no problem getting around. Life started to take shape here in Canada.
    We began to get to know our next-door-neighbors quit well and started to visit back and forth and they were all very nice and friendly. They had kids some slightly older than ours and some a little younger. I should mention here that we lived on the very end of Hastings Street on the lower slope of “Burnaby Mountain” so there was not much traffic of any sort so the kids where quite safe playing on the street. We also had a dog that kept growing from a “puppy” to a fair size Great Dane. He was quite friendly but very strong and somewhat hard to handle so the kids didn’t play with him much, but he managed to stay with them and protect them which he really did. One day the kids where playing with the neighbor kids in our driveway one of the boys, about 2 years older than Christina was sort of aggressive towards her and flash went over, grabbed the boy by the wrist and led him out of our driveway, once on the street he let the boy go and the boy (Jackie) ran home crying, of course his mom came and wondered what was going on. It took some convincing to get her to accept that no harm was done to her son.
   “Our” big peach tree yielded some huge peaches and lots of them so we were giving away peaches to all our friends and neighbors and Mariana made jams and canned peach preserves, I made peach wine and peach brandy out of the trimmings from the ones Mariana couldn’t use. The peaches on that tree were the largest and tastiest peaches I have ever come across to this day, We also got lots of strawberries and raspberries and a good supply of Blackberries and loganberries, but these were the wild variety and grew on the property next to ours. It was not cultivated land, just “wilderness”. One day we heard something rustling in the underbrush, we thought it might be a bear or cougar or some other wild animal Flash, our dog was barking franticly and tried to go in there and attack whatever it was but I held him back because I was not sure he would come out the winner, if indeed it was some larger wild creature. The excitement goes on for a few minutes and all of a sudden from the underbrush comes a pig, a half grown pig, apparently it had escaped from a pig farm about a quarter of a kilometer up.
the hill. We didn’t know it existed but that day we found out it did and also found out there was a mink farm up there
The pig got away and I suppose found it’s own way “home”.
Another thing we had was “daffodils”, millions of them all our friends at home and at work were getting daffodils from us.
   Well after we got settled in and Roly Started school in September in a nearby elementary school Mariana got a sewing machine and decided to try making Christening robes and sell them to the stores down town, it was tough going  but she made a few and we put them in a suitcase and took the bus down town and went to all the department stores and some exclusive Children’s clothes stores. Everyone she visited were delighted with what they saw and she got a few orders immediately several of the stores offered for her to take a job with them and be paid wages, she said “thank You but “no Thank you.
   There was one drawback with the whole scheme and that was that I still had very small take-home pay and we ended up using the money they paid her for these robes for our running living expense, where she really should have used it all to buy more supplies to make more robes. We also had no car so transportation was a real problem to take these suitcases around everywhere.
   The larger stores such as “The Hudson’s Bay, the Eaton store and Woodward’s, had whole big display windows featuring the robes in and it really looked marvelous. Too bad she had to give it up; she had a good thing going there. One thing I remember that I blamed it on was that before leaving Sweden I made a promise to Inga-Brita that I wouldn’t buy a car before buying a house, I kept that promise  but there were times when I wish I hadn’t.

   Eventually we got a cat a couple of rabbits and some baby chicks from Simpson Sears’s department store by mail (!).It was all “hunkey dory” (Like a Ukrainian Life boat) {joke}.