Playing Games at Home on Newtown Road
EXCERPT #9 TALES OF A RABBIT TOWN BOY by LeRoy Soper
(Tales of a Rabbit Town Boy was written by my late father LeRoy Soper, born in 1935 in St. John’s Newfoundland. This is the 9th excerpt from the book.)
In 1946, during those early days on Newtown Road, something frightening happened to me. My brother Ed and I used the unfinished walls of our home as our arena for running and playing catch or “tag.” Running down the hall and darting in and out of the spaces, jumping over piles of wood or gyprock, we had our daily games that boys are prone to play while waiting for supper.
It sometimes delayed bedtimes as well. Mother kept her sewing machine just inside the front room and Dad threw his coat over it many times in exhaustion from his long walk home. In one of our wild chases, I started to leap the sewing machine. Seeing Ed come the other way, I backed down to avoid his tag, unaware of what was sticking out of Dad’s pocket.
It was a one-inch chisel and as usual, Dad had honed it razor sharp. The chisel dug into my wrist and opened a two-inch gash that bled like a fountain. I raced screaming to the kitchen where Mom was preparing a hot supper.
After several attempts to stop the bleeding they decided to call Uncle Jack who had been in the medical corps during the war. He held my arm just the right way and the bleeding stopped enough for me to be quickly whisked off to the hospital. Several stitches closed the wound.
I was about eleven years old and even today under my watchband this wound remains. A fraction more up my arm and a main artery would have been cut — and who knows what might have happened after that.
Making wine in Ron’s bedroom
In our house on Newtown Road there was no insulation in the walls or ceilings. A glass of water would freeze by morning if we left it on a table in a bedroom. In the corner of the bedroom Ron and I shared, Ron had two large bottles full of grapes and prunes and other berries to make wine. In the middle of the night the corks blew out and the contents splattered everywhere.
Cold and fast asleep, we hardly heard anything, but when we were fully awake we saw our walls and ceiling had been instantly decorated with very aromatic contents. We enjoyed what was left of the fermented wine in the bottles, which held us in a state of drunkenness for most of the day. So much for Ron’s wine-making skills!
Hiding behind the couch
It soon became evident that books were my most cherished gifts. I always had a book in my hand. For a short time most schoolbooks had a lesser interest to me than the mystery novels of Hardy Boys and Mystery Hunters fame. Any book was great.
Our living and dining rooms had French doors separating them. Each had a fireplace with the dining room naturally having the furniture for eating. In the living room were several chairs that one could sink deeply into and virtually get lost.
One particular chair was placed close to the fireplace with its ornate and beautifully decorated mantle. When the fire was blazing it became the best place this side of Heaven to sit and read and experience the deep soul of a good book.
I was taught early how to make the fire blaze hot and furious. It was more than an hour before having to refresh the log fuel to have its flames rise to new heights again. This gave me the time to be fully engrossed in the adventures of my books.
Many times I escaped intrusion by climbing behind the large chesterfield. I got quite lost in the large cushions I used to create a comfortable position for reading. This way anyone could come in this room and never know I was there in my cozy retreat.
One day I concealed myself for so long that the family became quite concerned. “Where is LeRoy?” A search party was formed to find me while I was hearing all the commotion and worry expressed about my being lost. I could stifle my laughter for only so long.
Once they found me, they were happy I was safe and sound but then I received a sound punishment for creating such a scene. Later in life this became one of my mother’s favourite stories about my childhood.
Poker in the kitchen
What a strange contrast of activities went on in our home. Religious convictions may not have been very exciting or evangelical but we did go to the United Church on Gower Street fairly regularly. I loved to sing. I was engrossed in choral music and captivated by the sounds of that huge pipe organ. At home, Bibles were seen on tables, we said grace before each meal, and we supported most things that happened in the church. However, there was something contradictory going on.
After church on Sunday evenings a group of guys showed up at our house. My brother Ron was the ringleader of this bunch and sometimes Lloyd my stepbrother was present.
One of the regular players, Harold Andrews, never missed church. He served on the committee that took up the offerings at each service. But as soon as church was over, Harold was joined by these other guys to gamble through the late night and early hours in fairly high gambling stakes. There’s something wrong with this picture.
I don’t remember the names of the rest of this crew that sat, smoked and gambled around that large dining room table, but I was fascinated by the way they dealt the cards.
When one fellow had a good winning hand he smashed his knuckles on the table at the same instant the card was victoriously presented as the trump card to win what sometimes was a good-sized “pot.” I walked around the table and observed what each player was doing and before long I could figure this game out very well.
The faked smiles and gestures revealed the kind of hand being held or played. It was strategy and intrigue seeing as they worked their way through a hand and shouted at a win or groaned at a loss. Each hand may have been a small pot, but by the time each game was finished the total may have been ten or twenty dollars.
Many times the biggest winner could have walked home at two in the morning with over one hundred dollars of gambling winnings. Ron often won.
One time, Ron said to me, “LeRoy, I gotta go to the bathroom real bad. Do you think you could play my hand while I’m gone?”
There I sat, at the head of the table playing poker with guys twice my age or more and scared I might lose all of Ron’s money. I won the next hand and gathered the money and piled it in front of me. I won the next hand and the other poker-faced players falsely laughed at my “beginner’s luck.”
Ron must have had kidney trouble or something else because he was gone for about twenty minutes. During his absence, I won every hand and increased Ron’s winnings by about forty dollars. They were all glad for his return.
