When the hired men are your housemates
If you’re a regular reader, you’ll know I grew up on a dairy farm. My father was the outlier in his family - the son of a doctor in southeast London, he fantasized as a kid about becoming a farmer. After the war things were not great in England so he packed himself up and came to Canada to be a farm hand. Those were the days when you arrived at Toronto’s Union Station after your weeks’ long boat trip and farmers would waiting to hire you. He met mom in the next couple of years and by the time I was born, 15 years and 5 children into their marriage, they owned a 200 acre dairy farm near Wingham, in southwestern Ontario.
If you’re a regular reader, you may also have an inkling about my dad’s single-mindedness. As hellbent as he was on being a farmer as a kid, in his early 40s, his fire for farming was extinguished and replaced with a fervour for flying.* To get time to immerse himself fully in the hobby, he needed to work less. He advertised in UK farming papers for a live-in hired man. My four English grandparents conducted interviews and sent us Jim who landed at Pearson, an unknown-to-us quantity. My siblings had mostly left home so it was pretty novel to have someone living with us, especially an exotic English stranger. That said, I don’t have any memories of Jim except that he scored big-time with me when he gave me a Barbie bicycle for Christmas.
After a short while, Jim left to buy a farm of his own** prompting a second British search. I remember #2, David, very clearly. He wasn’t much older than I was and not the respectable sort Jim had been. It was a different time and no-one thought much about it then, but David is not someone you’d now leave alone your pre-teen daughter. They did and thankfully nothing resulted from it. David did however engage in a number of other questionable activities in our innocent community. That coupled with the fact he was not very responsible in the work - he put gasoline in the diesel tractor, for example - after just months, dad let him go. No idea where he ended up.
Then came a stream of Canadian live-in hired men so varied that some of them were even women (although still referred to as “the hired man”). Doubtless, they also have their blog-worthy tales of us, because there was nothing conventional about the way we lived. First, we had no television, which in Ontario in the 1970s, was a sure way to label yourself weird. Then there was that airplane obsession, complete with runway in front of the house. Add in the fact mom and dad were British, we listened to classical music, refused (with judgment) cash deals, hung out with people who likely voted NDP, didn’t follow any sports, and didn’t attend church — oh indeed, we were way outside Huron County’s range of normal. One of the men was so introverted I don’t really remember him speaking at all. Very smiley though and pleasant to have at the supper table which was really all the contact I had with these guys. For a while we had a local woman who was called a girl (when she wasn’t being called the hired man) even though she was doing a man’s job. One of the advantages of having a dairy farmer for a father (contra other kinds of farming) is that he was very comfortable with matters related to female reproduction and so wasn’t fazed by the need for time off during menstruation. I didn’t realize then how progressive he was being.
The last of the live-ins pissed my mother off. He didn’t realize she was in charge of the house and started to volunteer opinions about how he saw the house should be run. The death knell for him was when he entertained friends in the front room(!!!) having moving my TV there.*** Although my parents rarely shared their divergence of opinion with me, I suspect there was one long discussion behind closed doors on this issue. The TV-shifting bossy-boots launched us into a new era: a series of local farm boys, prepared to work for odd-ball neighbours and go home to their own TVs.****
Having live-in hired men so defined me that it prompted my first publication as a 14-year-old writer. I share that clipping from Huron County’s “Rural Voice" with you today.
* He got his private pilot’s licence and built “the Jodel,” our first wooden sibling. Check out my story here about the day my mother got fed up with hobby-widowhood and left home.
** Google tells me there is someone with his name in eastern Ontario working in an agri-related business so I’m guessing his immigration story was successful.
*** Yes, I broke down as a teen and bought my own in a desperate and futile attempt to catch up on some cool-factor. I documented my love affair with TV in a blog found here.
**** I was the last hired man. You can read my story of that here.
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