The Great White Terror

Life for a Saskatchewan farm boy was really pretty good. For the first couple of years, with my brother Harold and my seven sisters all in school, I had a lot of time to myself. Mothers, those days didn't have a lot of time to lavish on a solitary little kid. I had to learn to entertain myself. That wasn't hard to do because I liked sitting on the kitchen floor leafing through the pages of Mother's Five Roses cookbook. It had the most tempting coloured illustrations. When that palled, there was the Eaton's catalogue or the nice shiny attachments for the sewing machine which made attractive playthings.

Outdoors, in the summertime, the farmyard offered everything that any little boy could possibly want. It took up several acres and had vast plantings of trees that enclosed the entire farmyard and divided it into sections. With the gardens, the orchard, the machinery and all the farm buildings there was always something to explore or climb on and I cannot recall every being bored.

I think every one of us, from the oldest to the youngest, would have a story to tell about a bad-tempered white rooster we had that loved to chase little kids. Actually, we must have had a succession of such roosters because no individual bird could have had a career that spanned the twenty-two years from Melvin all the way to Arlene. Family legend has it that Norma, as a toddler, had been attacked by the rooster and was so traumatized the she wouldn't ever go near a white feather for fear that the rooster might be lurking nearby. Mother took advantage of Norma's phobia by placing white feathers on the stairways and other hazardous spots around the house and yard. It worked. Norma grew up without ever tumbling down the cellar stairs. I had my own frightening encounter with the old monster or one of his grandsons and well remember running for my life and rolling under a barbed wire fence to escape the Great White Terror.