Page 31 - Forest Grove Years 17 Feb

nose resulting in a flow of
blood. At that point Tom quit
and the fight was called in
my favour. We remained in
Forest Grove for the year I
was in grade eight. No other
memories stand out for me
during that year although I
spent a lot of time with Phil
Wilcox. We would spend
weekends at each other’s
homes and he was a fre-
quent visitor at our Ruth
Lake property.
Life at Home in Forest
Grove 1954—1956
I recall getting up early in
the morning with my dad to
feed the cattle their staple
breakfast of hay bales and
turnips that had been grown
in one of our fields and
stored over the winter in the
root cellar. My routine tasks
were to keep the wood box
full and to bring in buckets
This was the building in which I completed grade 8.
of sawdust for the kitchen
stove. I was once sent out to capture a chicken for dinner and to remove its head. I had
seen this done many times but found it difficult. The axe was so heavy that it required
two hands to swing but this meant letting go of the chicken which would then escape.
My father was not pleased by my ineptitude.

I left Forest Grove in 1956, the year I completed grade 8 at the local school, and I be-
lieve that the property was sold in the same year. My summers were, however, always
spent at the lake with my mother and brother.
While I was away at boarding school on Vancouver Island my mother and father relo-
cated to West Vancouver. Initially they lived in a small duplex on Duchess Avenue but
later bought a house at 980 Wildwood Lane. The Wildwood Lane house was located at
the bottom of the British Properties with the backyard facing the main road to Horse-
shoe Bay. My father worked in real estate, at first, for a small company called Wilson
and Kofoed where he specialized in the sale of agricultural properties throughout the
province. This was not employment to which he was constitutionally suited as it often
required a great deal of time to show a property only to have a sale fall through at the
last moment. I was away at school during much of this time but could certainly feel the
tension on my visits home for Christmas and over the summer holiday. My mother had
also gone back to work during this period. She was a trained social worker and was em-
ployed by the Ministry of Social Services to inspect rest homes for the elderly. This was
to ensure that they met government standards. At some point in the mid sixties, and I