Oliver Jones. Marthe Sansregret
should take private piano lessons. However, it would not be that year. Oliver, who had natural rhythm, who played music without counting the beat, first had to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Oliver himself was far from enthused by the idea of sitting in a classroom for hours on end.
CHAPTER III A Community Childhood: A Passion for Sports and Music 1940–1945
After his last year of relative freedom, Oliver, who had just turned six, started school without complaining too much. He even made a habit of arriving in advance in the mornings, as he always detested being late. However, he found the days very long, and as soon as class was over, he would head for home, running like Jesse Owens. After a snack, he played with his friends, most of whom had parents from the West Indies, like his own.
As Little Burgundy was a multi-ethnic neighbourhood, Oliver also played with French-speaking children who called themselves Canadiens, “English” children who included those of Scottish and Irish descent, and children of Mohawk, Italian, Jewish, Polish, Chinese, Lithuanian, Hungarian, and other extractions.
Oliver felt that these children were very much like he was, except for two things. The first and most striking difference he noticed was the respect that children of the Black community were expected to show towards their elders, especially old people. This was an important part of their upbringing. Respect for other children was also stressed. The second difference that struck Oliver was the fact that some of the White children spoke languages other than English in their homes. He asked his father: “Daddy, how come we don’t have a language of our own?” Oliver always remembered his father’s reply: “We had a language, but it was taken away from us a long time ago.”
Oliver learned French on the street. Also, like most children his age, he and his playmates would call each other names. “I remember very well when I was young that the French were ‘French pea soup’ or ‘frogs,’ and the English were the ‘blokes.’ I think everyone had some kind of name – there were the Chinese kids whose fathers worked at the laundry, and so on. At a very early age, I had a close friend that I walked to school with. He was Jewish and his father, Mr. Malcolm Rosen, owned a junkyard.”
As far as religion was concerned, Oliver didn’t see much difference between the Protestant faith as practised by his family and the Roman Catholic faith of his parents’ closest friends, except that Protestant ministers could marry and have families while Catholic priests could not, and Catholic families had large numbers of children. He commented later in life: “You just grow up and wonder why we attach so much importance to differences among various faiths, when the first rule to learn is Love Thy Neighbour!”
An emphasis on honesty characterized the moral education of Oliver’s childhood, to a point he sometimes found exasperating. “Of course all of us have lied! I lied for sure myself when I was young.”
In the Black community, parents didn’t have to worry at whose house their child was playing: they looked out for each other’s children. And if a child behaved badly, he could be sure that his mother would be aware of it before he got home and he expected to be scolded accordingly.
But one day, Oliver, Richard Parris, and Bruce Parent did something that went beyond their usual shenanigans. Richard described their adventure as their first and last attempt at stealing. “This particular day, we said to Oliver: ‘You see the toffee apples on the counter near the door? Well, let’s see if we can get one of them.’ But knowing how strict our parents were, if we ever got caught in anything like that, it’s not like today when you can’t touch your child. Boy, we would have had some warm seats… oh boy, oh boy! I am still to this day wondering if my parents found out. I know we ran away. The restaurant was Gerry’s on St. James, west of Fulford Street. It was Annette – poor her – she was in the back of the store, it was almost like a bar and stools, she had this tray with toffee apples. Oh, boy, they looked good. But they were stuck. I remember putting my hand on a stick and they all came down.”
Oliver remembered the incident very well. “My two friends dared me to go and steal three toffee apples for the three of us. I was the smallest; the counter was way above my head. When the door opened, someone came in and Annette was serving someone else. I remember her yelling at me: ‘I know you, I know you!’. It was nine cents for the three apples and I don’t think I’ve had a worse week in my life! I knew I had to go back and pay that nine cents to that woman and I worried about whether she would tell my parents or not, because they used to buy at the same store. I suffered for a whole week. Since every Friday I would get five cents from my parents, I came up one week later with ten cents. Annette wasn’t mad. She had a kind of smile on her face and she said ‘I knew it was you! Don’t do it anymore!’ I gave her the ten cents.”
It was such a dramatic incident in his life that Oliver believed it cured him for good. “I don’t think I could have been a good thief. I don’t remember if my parents heard about it, but I remember that my godfather who lived close to the store knew about it.” However, this episode was exceptional in Oliver’s secure childhood, with its routine of school, playing with Richard, and practising the piano. Both he and Richard adored baseball, and would fight over who would bat and who would throw the ball. They would argue, tussle, play, and go home. The next day, they would do it all over again.
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When Canada was about to enter the Second World War, Oliver’s friends told him that their fathers or brothers were considering enlisting. While some of these men may have been stirred by a desire to fight for freedom, others were motivated by the lack of a job to support their families. But when Oliver brought up the subject of the war at home, his father, still haunted by his memories and his nightmares about the previous conflict, would change the subject.
Even if the war was to be fought abroad, the boys heard enough about it to want to play soldiers. One day, Oliver and another child were shooting at a can with a BB gun when suddenly he was shot in his right eye! Whether it was an accident or not, the neighbours on the street began shouting at the other youngster. Mr. Jones, who was nearby, tried unsuccessfully to remove the pellet lodged deep in Oliver’s eye. He rushed to the Reddy Memorial Hospital with Oliver, who was in acute pain, besides being terrified. The doctor, after extracting the piece of metal, declared that only time would tell if Oliver would fully recover his sight in that eye.
Soon after the accident, the Jones family moved again, this time from Workman to Fulford Street, into a two-floor apartment. On the lower floor, there was a bedroom for the only boy in the family, a flowery wallpapered dining room connected to a living room in which the piano had pride of place, and a large kitchen at the back. Upstairs were the master bedroom, a bedroom for Oliver’s three sisters, another room that was rented out, and a bathroom with a tub but no shower, still a luxury in those days. But thanks to Violet, who was a real handyman, the Joneses soon had a shower. Like all their previous dwellings, this house also had a backyard, from which Oliver had an advantageous view of the adjoining yard… behind the girls’ school. When he began spending time watching the girls playing and chatting, his piano practices suffered in consequence.
However, this was more because classical music had begun to bore him. What Oliver really wanted was to play jazz, although it meant disobeying his father. Even his sisters, knowing the difference between serious music and “playing for fun,” would attack him whenever he indulged his fancy on the piano. This happened one day when the living-room window was open and the gang of Palmer children, who were playing across the street, began yelling “Oliver’s playing jazz!” Lillian, the eldest girl in the Jones family, immediately took up the refrain, repeating shrilly: “Oliver’s taking classical music lessons and he’s playing jazz instead!”
Word got around quickly: Madame Jeanne Bonin, a kind woman and an excellent piano teacher, was told of her pupil’s penchant for exchanging compositions by Bach and Beethoven for a type of music she thought was unworthy, and she reprimanded Oliver in consequence. Oliver Wesley began to keep a more attentive eye on his son’s musical training. Every morning when he left for work, he would remind Shirley, with whom Oliver loved to bicker and fight, to make sure that her brother kept to the