Loading ...I loved train travel . I accompanied my mother from Montreal to Vancouver in Pullman sleepers in 1942 to visit her brother and my grandmother . My first taste of sugar was in the dining car at breakfast . My mother was not well one morning and the porter offered to take me to the dining car for breakfast so that she could settle her stomach . ” what does the boy eat ? ”
” Just Oatmeal porridge and cream is fine .” BTW I had never seen a person of color before that trip .
We were seated and my porridge arrived . He put cream over it , then a spoonful of some white stuff that was in a bowl on the table was sprinkled on top . It was war time , sugar was rationed and rare . Then he took a spoonful and stuck it in my mouth . WOWEE WOW !!! Where has THIS stuff been all my life ?!!
After that I thought all black people were like gods .
My dad saw us off at the start of the trip and returned to his work in Labrador helping to finish the military airstrip there (Goose Bay) – the jumping off airstrip for all North American military aircraft headed for the European theater. My father was tall and we had come down from Kirkland Lake by trains pulled by regular steam engines , but when that transcontinental train pulled past us and stopped so my mother and I as well as others could board , the locomotive was massive! The drive wheels were taller than my father ! – ( for speed crossing the prairies ). No diesel locomotives in that era .
Three years later we travelled to my mother’s birthplace on Cape Breton Island , Nova Scotia by rail .
By the time I started school I had seen both the Pacific and the Atlantic thanks to steam locomotives .