Girl in a Red River Coat

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

This lively memoir of a 1930s Montreal childhood was first published in
1970 when Mary Peate was well established as a prolific writer in radio
and TV and greatly loved for her CBC radio show Tea & Trumpets, in which
she aired humour and jazz for seven years. Born in Ontario, she moved
with her family to Montreal when she was four.

The charm of the book lies in the wealth of detail about a time when
the eggman and the coalman came to call, when Mary and her friends
entertained themselves with cork work, bolo bats, joke phone calls,
sending away for things, and smelling magazines blindfolded—a talent
peculiar only to the author. She must have had a keen sense of smell;
she tells of a streetcar with “foul, banana-smelling fumes.” Here
are the songs children sang, the jargon they used to play ball, the
books they read. Here also is the hunger of men who came to the door
asking for food.

Although the tale bubbles along with humour and an astonishing recall
of childhood sensations, there were two big troubles in Mary’s life: a
stroke-stricken aunt was installed in her bedroom, and her Catholic
school spent too much time on religion and discipline. Mary voiced her
resentment against the aunt in embarrassingly loud protest at home; at
school, she was a disruptive force with her sassy remarks and
contradictions and once refused to kneel and apologize to a nun.

She was blessed with parents who were readers and who satisfied her
innate curiosity at home, but did not flourish at school until she came
in at the bottom of the class. The teacher then forbade other students
to talk or play with her for a month. That put Mary to her books; after
a lonely month, she placed seventh. On a whim, she sent the aunt a
get-well card in the hope that the aunt would get well and out of
Mary’s bed. In some mysterious way, that worked too.