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'When I Grew to Love the Outdoors and Books'

Glimpses of a Depression-era Hornby Island childhood.

Margaret Sharcott 27 Jul 2012TheTyee.ca

Margaret Sharcott published Troller's Holiday, about the journey she took in 1954 with husband Stan and infant son David from their home in Kyuquot, on the West Coast of Vancouver Island, in 1957.

[Editor's note: In 1957, Margaret Sharcott published a book, Troller's Holiday, about the journey she took in 1954 with her husband Stan and infant son David from their home in Kyuquot, on the West Coast of Vancouver Island. Circling the island by fishing boat, they saw a rapidly changing coastal society. In her mid-20s at the time of the journey, Sharcott also recalled growing up on Hornby Island in the Depression. Her family's farm was in what is now Helliwell Park.

Margaret Sharcott died in 1988. Her son David has kindly allowed The Tyee to publish a slightly abridged version of her Hornby Island memoir -- a vivid account of an almost-forgotten time in B.C.]

I have never set foot on Hornby Island since the rainy April day when I left over 12 years ago. This trip down the straits was bringing me closer to my old home than I had been since then. The warm balmy air filled me with nostalgia for the life of the paradise islands, with their warm sunny days a contrast to the days of rain and wind that fall to the lot of the unprotected coast. Not that it, too, does not have a charm of its own, but it is a more rugged type of existence.

Now I remembered the old farmhouse build of an old boathouse, beachcombed lumber, cedar poles, and shakes. Including the pantry and storeroom, there were six rooms. All were draughty and cold, even when two fires burned red-hot throughout the north-easters of winter. I well remember nights when my feet were never warm despite several blankets and a heated and covered flat-iron at the foot of the bed.

My grandparents had been infected with the land hunger of the turn of the century. In 1914 my grandfather sold his business in the mining town of Cumberland on Vancouver Island and, with his eldest son, applied for homestead lands on Hornby Island. With the little money left from the sale of his business he was going to put his farm on a firm footing and then retire.

A fine living for all

Of the 240 acres they obtained on the southern tip of the island, half of it belonged to his son. There seemed very little reason to believe it would not provide a fine living for all.

As their land was virgin, there were no buildings, so the family of five, the parents, two boys and girl, my mother, lived in tents for eight months. There were only two or three other families on the island then, but they were quick to help with hoisting the boathouse which they planned on using for the main part of their house to a suitable spot. Later they added a lean-to kitchen. Its shake roof never failed to leak after I was born, and on rainy days pots and pans were strewn around the room to catch the drips. There was no ceiling, and high up among the rafters dust caught and hung in streamers. Heat from the black iron stove that roared against the pantry wall rose steadily upward.

In return for their land they had agreed to erect this house and clear a certain number of acres. Soon a hay field and a garden were ready for the plough. Although until the day they left, over 30 years later, they hoped for more fields, there was never much land under cultivation.

To compensate, there was much excellent natural grazing land on the south-western side of the island. Here, above steep cliffs, wild grass grew luxuriantly. Sheep thrived. The climate was so mild that I never remember any special precautions being taken for bad weather. They would find shelter in the trees a few yards from the open prairie land.

By lambing time the weather could usually be counted on to be mild, so there was nothing to worry about. I remember walking with my uncle as he went to count the new lambs. It was usually warmer on this side of the farm, as the house faced the winds of the open gulf. I often wondered why they had not taken advantage of the sunny side, but I think there was no water nearby for household use.

My grandfather died a few months before I was born. My mother, who had married the preceding year, returned to comfort her grief-stricken mother. While she was staying at the homestead, there were disagreements and my parents separated. I was raised on the farm with my mother, grandmother, and uncle. My father was a vague name associated with a fishing boat.

Going to school by correspondence

We were five miles away from the school. As three miles is the legal limit that a child can be expected to walk to school, and this was before the advent of school buses, I was educated by correspondence courses. Actually I have always felt that it would have been possible for me to attend the one-room school if I had owned a bicycle. Others just as far away as I did so after their primary years. My family didn't see it that way, so I did my lessons on a little table by the living-room fire.

These correspondence courses are a boon to the isolated child. Each subject is carefully taught, from primary to secondary matriculation. The teaching is thorough and closely follows the B.C. school curriculum. Any child who does correspondence school work has no difficulty in taking up at the right point in a school. Often he is somewhat in advance of students of the same age and grade, as by this method there is no such thing as a good or bad teacher, or overcrowded schools.

I completed Grades 1 to 7 in this way and I should have finished Grade 8, but by then I knew I was going to town. The lure of a school was too much; I didn't complete all the lessons, so I started in Grade 8 when I went to Courtenay. I have often felt the correspondence days were invaluable in many ways. I learned to read books for pleasure and self-improvement and follow written directions as I never would have without it. Its only disadvantage was the loneliness. There were no playmates. I remember those rare occasions of normal play with other children as highlights in a quiet life.

As I had no playmates, I entertained myself. There were involved games of make-believe. There were hours spent in my own flower garden where I learned much about plants. My grandmother always spent a great deal of time in growing flowers around the house. I was introduced to the hobby very young. A small plot of ground behind the woodshed served to put in the plants that had multiplied too much in her gardens. I dug, weeded, trimmed and played. Probably I played more than I gardened, but today I find that most of what I know about gardens was learned then.

Finding the cows, rounding up the sheep

For companionship I followed the adults at their chores. There were long walks to find the cows. Those animals wandered far and wide. Unhampered by field fences, they grazed on the bluffs or under the trees. I do not think there were ever more than six at a time. They were milked night and morning, but, unlike most farm children, I was never taught to milk.

Then there were the sheep round-ups. The sheep had to be brought into the tiny corral near the barn two or three times for shearing, lamb tail-docking or separating saleable lambs from the main flock. Those days were noisy with their bleats as ewe called to offspring and lambs ran from ewe to ewe in search of their mothers.

There was the never-ending job of fuel-cutting. There was never a power-saw on the farm and so all wood was cut by hand. My uncle spent hours with the cross-cut saw and the rest of us spent more hours gathering bark off the beaches. There was always quite a bit of it scattered from the log booms that were continually passing or anchoring in the lee of the bluffs.

There was a rowboat but I never learned to row, since the family was over-solicitous for my safety. I did enjoy boat rides whenever my mother or uncle found the time to take me. They might troll for a cod on a cold winter's day or row to Flower Island where rowboat fishermen camped. Some summers I was lucky enough to have playmates among the fishermen's children, but more often there were no women living in these ramshackle camps.

Most of these fishermen lived in tiny driftwood shacks for the summer months, trolling long hours for the few blue-backs. As these were the depression years, they received a tragically low price. One man who camped there with his wife and family found that during the worst of those years, the entire family had to fish to buy food. He built their boats and each rowed and dragged their lines for a few hours daily.

Masses of wild flowers

One of my greatest pleasures in childhood was the masses of wild flowers. I have never seen such variety in a small area since. In early spring there were white dog-tooth violets, brown chocolate lilies and orange tiger lilies. Strangely enough, there were none of the trilliums that are so common on the eastern side of Vancouver Island.

As summer came along there were wild bulbs of every sort, blue and white camas, wild onion and peacocks. There were gay creepers, massing in tiny blue flowers. Yellow mimulus in rock crevices, hollows purple with wild violets, stately wild babies' breath, all grew profusely. In the wood, sweet-scented wild honeysuckle, both orange and purple, grew. Flowering red currant bushes flamed beside waxy white mock orange blossoms. Spicy pink twin-flower crept by the roadside.

But the crowning glory of all was the golden satin blossoms of the prickly pear cactus which grows only in dry places in the gulf islands and southern Vancouver Island. Exotic as it is, it can be a curse. Its spines are sharper and longer than most darning needles. When walking on the dry bluffs where it grew, it was always wise to watch carefully, as the spines could easily pierce a shoe.

Only the best trees logged

The trees were mostly fir with some cedar. Two or three times there was some logging on the homestead. Then the trees were sold to loggers, who harvested them, leaving behind some of the usual rubble. Never were these operations as devastating as those of the big companies today. Only the best were selected; many not considered worthwhile in those days of low prices and poor markets. Some of the discarded limbs were piled and burned, and often new small patches of grazing land were opened up this way. Grass seemed to flourish wherever the trees didn't shade too heavily.

...Behind the dairy-house there was a tall blue elderberry tree. In summer it was loaded with bunches of tiny blue berries that make superb pies. Most of the berries, however, usually found their way to the bellies of flocks of pigeons which swarmed over it.

In front of the house, near the beach, stood three wild cherry trees. Although their fruit could have been made into jelly, my family didn't appreciate the tart result, so they were merely decorative. They were very beautiful indeed when they were covered with masses of white flowers in the early spring, and later when they were covered with clusters of tiny red cherries.

There were also tame fruit trees and although there was usually a good supply of small tart plums, sweeter prune-plums, and some apples, none of the trees bore as well as they should. I believe this was largely due to a lack of pruning, but for some reason the family seemed to take little interest in the orchard.

Fruit trees do extremely well in the mild climate of the gulf islands, so what didn't grow at home was easy to get elsewhere. Farmers who had more than they could use would give a box of apples or prunes, and there was at least one abandoned orchard that could be raided.

The kitchen garden, where lettuce, beans, carrots, beets, marrows and pumpkins grew, was fenced with a six-foot picket fence to keep the deer from ruining it. Even then, deer had been known to dine on succulent greens, then escape! We saw deer everywhere. Often they were does and dappled fawns; other times they were spiked bucks.

Throughout the homestead there were several swampy hollows that filled with water during the winter rains until they looked like miniature lakes. In these ponds, ducks abounded. Gay mallards swam beside tiny black-and-white butterballs. For about two weeks each year brant blackened the salt water in front of the house. They were never disturbed and seemed fearless, only flying if a boat approached.

We saw the V-formations of geese as they flew north in the spring and south in the fall, but I do not recall hearing of any who rested near the homestead.

When the cat provided dinner

There were grouse in the bushes and their hooting and drumming resounded through the woods each spring. Infrequently one ended up in the oven. One time, our big black cat unexpectedly provided us with a grouse dinner. Mother rushed out to see what the commotion was. The cat crouched under the steps with a large, untouched grouse in his paws. He lost his dinner and we gained one.

There were no sand beaches around our homestead but there was a polished gravel beach in front of the house where we went swimming. These rocks were quite different from common gravel, for they were very shiny and very pretty. There was also a good percentage of rough agates among them. Their beauty was so unusual that at one time a man and woman from Vancouver used to stay at one of the summer resorts while they collected rocks. (There were one or two other beaches similar to ours on the island.) They used them to inlay coffee tables and other decorative objects, which they sold.

...Those were lonely years when I grew to love the outdoors and books. It was a life typical of many other pioneer homesteaders of B.C.  [Tyee]

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