Exits and Entrances - Chapter Two by Dave Jaffe

     Chapter Two- Montreal: A City of 13 years.


    I came with my family to Montreal in early August 1953. We pulled into the Windsor train station in downtown Montreal after a six day sail across the Atlantic Ocean on a 20,000 ton liner that berthed in Quebec City. The liner had the right name. It was called the S.S. Atlantic. A train then whisked us to Montreal.
     The heat wrapped its humid suffocating arms around us the moment the five of us carried our luggage onto Montreal's Dorchester Street. Thirteen-and-a-half years later in late 1966, my sister Valerie and I sat on a train that pulled out of another Montreal train station as snow lashed the rails. We headed west to join our parents in Vancouver.
      In those thirteen years or more I and my family lived through one hellish moment after another. Landlords threw us out of six apartments for non-payment of rent. Through winters and summers we went nowhere until my sister Sylvia, took off to California.  We lived from hand to mouth barely existing at times, while scraping through one horrible year after another   "You were poor when you left for Canada," a relative said years later. "And in Canada you just got poorer."
     My mother said many times in that journey through hell, "We are as poor as the proverbial church mouse." She was right.

      But at the beginning things went well. My father found us a room in a rooming house right across from McGill University on Sherbrooke Street. Then we quickly moved into an apartment building on Decarie Boulevard in Notre dame de Grace or 'NDG' as it was called back then.
      Then my father found a job in  a dress factory. My parents took in boarders and at first there were no problems. Every weekday I crossed the busy Decarie Boulevard - which is now a freeway - to go to Iona Avenue school, as did my younger sister Valerie. Sylvia went off to West Hill High, a fair distance west.
    At first Montreal astounded me. I gazed wide- eyed at the beautiful neon covered stores on Sainte Catherine Street in the downtown area. I marvelled at the huge coloured cars that roared along city streets. And I couldn't believe the amount of goods that piled up on supermarket shelves. I'd just come from post-war England where meat, eggs, butter and a whole lot of other things were still strictly rationed.
      But not everything ran perfectly, as I soon found out.