Max Braithwaite - Never Sleep Three in a Bed

An M&S Paperback from McClelland & Stewart Inc.

Copyright 1971 by Max Braithwaite

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher - or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Canadian Reprography Collective - is an infringement of the copyright law.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Braithwaite, Max, 1911
Never sleep three in a bed

First published 1969.
eISBN: 978-1-55199-648-6

I. Title.
PS8503.R34N48 1988 C813 .54 C88-095210-5
PR9199.3.B735N48 1988

SELECTED TITLES BY MAX BRAITHWAITE

Its the Family Way
The Night We Stole the Mounties Car
Why Shoot the Teacher
Never Sleep Three in a Bed
A Privilege and a Pleasure
Lusty Winter
McGrubers Folly
The Commodores Barge Is Alongside
Max: The Best of Braithwaite
All the Way Home

McClelland & Stewart Inc.
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T O M OTHER ,

whose indomitable spirit, strength, love and humour

pulled us through the bad time.

T O D AD ,

who made the whole family possible.

T O MY FOUR BROTHERS AND THREE SISTERS ,

who have been so much a part of my life.

Whenever I hear talk of the population explosion, the desperate need for birth-control or the pill, I am troubled. I look away and cough and scratch my rump, and try to switch the conversation to Vietnam or something equally uncontroversial. For I happen to be the sixth in a family of eight children, and had my parents been wiser, or more cautious, or better informed on family planning, I should never have been born at all. And I should have hated that.

My mother has since admitted to me that she looked forward to my coming with something less than jubilation. Shed had five already within a period of seven years, and had been hoping for a few years off. But what was the poor woman to do? She loved her husband, and a body cant be careful all the time. Nevertheless, once I arrived she loved me and cared for me, and Im grateful for it.

Our family wasnt a big one as families went during the first quarter of the century, just a comfortable size. Ten at the table for each meal is a good round number, and five boys and three girls is a fair and equitable balance of the sexes. Ive heard my sister Doris dispute this when she was in a snit over something those boys had done or said, but then she might be considered prejudiced.

I was born in the middle of the night in the dead of winter, in the midst of a real cold snap. Doc Brown, who had to drag himself out of bed, pull on his fur cap and buffalo-hide coat and mitts, and trudge the three blocks to our house through the snapping cold, is reported to have grumbled, Dont see why those damned Braithwaite kids cant be born in the summer. All but ones been a winter baby!

When he got upstairs to the cold front bedroom, where my mother lay gasping in the big wooden bed, and pulled me from the warmth of her body I naturally began to howl. I continued to howl, too, almost constantly they say, so as almost to drive my mother mad. The truth was, of course, that I was hungry, and there wasnt enough nourishment in my tired mothers breasts to satisfy me. After all, the care of five small children, along with the chores of fetching water, carrying coal, stoking fires, feeding chickens, washing by hand, baking bread and preserving crab-apples had taken something out of her. Bottle-feeding being on the long list of Methodist sins I continued to hunger and howl.

That howling, as a matter of fact, almost brought me to a premature end. When Mother was well enough to travel, Father, who was a rising young lawyer in the fastest-growing town in the fastest-growing province in the West, decided to take her, and what kids couldnt be left behind, on the C.P.R. to the West Coast. The other kids werent that much trouble, but I was a holy terror. The mountain air made me hungrier, and I bawled louder. Day and night I bawled, without let-up, single-lungedly ruining the trip for a Pullman car full of tourists. My poor mother was so distracted that as she stood by the railing of the ferry-boat carrying us across Georgia Strait my sister Doris heard her mutter, Hush, you little demon, or Ive a good mind to drop you overboard. Doris, a sober seven-year-old, who took her duties as eldest girl seriously, was in such a panic for the rest of the trip that she refused to leave Mothers side, lest she really did carry out this horrible threat. Come to think of it, I probably owe my life to Doris.

The effect of my early hunger left a life-long mark upon me. For no sooner was I able to reach for food, or find it, or steal it, than I began cramming it into my mouth as though there would never be any more. As a natural consequence I became fat, and portliness has been the key to my personality development ever since.

Each of us in this life has his own division of people. The black power advocate sees all humans as black or white. The communist sees them as rich or poor. The feminist sees the world as made up of mean men and good women; the WASP sees them as pure and impure; the French Canadian as exploiter and exploitee, and so on.

Well, the fat man sees the world as divided into two classeslean and stout. The lean resent the stout, scoff at them, humiliate them and, Im sure if they were able, would pass discriminatory laws against them. They also assume that each pudgy person yearns to be slim, which is of course absolute nonsense. All the fat person wants is to be accepted as a person, to be treated as an individual, to be greeted by old acquaintances with a simple, Hello there, fellow, hows tricks? instead of, Putting on a little lard there around the middle arent you, old boy?

Thus, early in life, I learned to regard all skinny persons as natural enemies, out to get me. There is nothing paranoid in this, you understand. Nevertheless, it does seem odd that every teacher, doctor, scoutmaster, policeman, producer, director, editor or publisher with whom Ive had to deal in my entire life has had a lean and hungry look, and has been definitely dangerous.

Early on, my brother Hub tagged me with the nickname Fat, and after that I was forced to lick every new kid that called me by that opprobrious label. Thus, what might well have been an individual with a gentle, loving, out-going nature was transformed into a vicious, mean, thin-skinned wretch, ever quick to take offence, and to snap suspiciously even at the hand extended in friendship.

And it all began at my mothers breast.

The house in which I was born was large and square, and stood on the edge of the town of Nokomis, Saskatchewan. It was made of cement blocks, but for some reason has always been referred to by the family as the old stone house. It was built as a hospital, when the town was first established in 1905, by two civic-minded ladies from Chicago. According to a historical booklet, the corner-stone was laid with a short religious service, and the band of the Royal Templars provided open air entertainment. While the Grand Trunk Railway was being built the hospital did a good business in broken bones, crushed feet, squeezed-off hands and frost-bite, but after the railway was finished trade fell off, the good ladies returned to Chicago, and Dad bought the house for his expanding family. The way kids keep getting sick, hes reported to have said, a hospital will be just the thing.