Born Naked Read Online Free PDF Page A

had taken place shortly after my birth.
    The summer of 1921 had been exceedingly hot and dry. So Angus’s old friend, Norman Kidd, who had a cottage on the south shore of the bay not far from the mouth of the Murray Canal, invited us to come and stay with them in what was to be the first of many visits spanning several years.
    The Kidd cottage was a cavernous, roughly built, almost windowless, frame structure originally constructed by Norman’s father as a duck-hunting camp. Its walls were plastered with enormous, highly coloured posters depicting ducks, geese, bears, moose, et cetera, being slaughtered by intrepid sportsmen. Even as a very young child I felt the chill of death in this gloomy space. Fortunately, we three had to enter it only to have our meals. We slept in a screened-in, canvas-roofed cabin where we benefited from whatever breeze might waft in off the bay.
    The wayward little cluster of shacks and cabins composing “Kidds’ Cottage” included a fine ice-house. In the days before rural electrification, almost every family around the bay had one of these to supply the kitchen ice-box. Every winter tons of ice blocks were hand-sawed out of the frozen bay, hauled ashore in horse-drawn sleighs, and stored between layers of sawdust in garage-sized structures whose walls and ceilings were also thickly insulated with sawdust.
    Ice-houses were a special summer domain of children. During the blistering heat of August days, we youngsters would spend hours cooling our bottoms and our bare feet in the wet sawdust while the crickets whirred outside. The Kidds’ ice-house was a chill, dark sanctuary where the imagination was free to create worlds of one’s own. Sometimes the place would become a polar bear’s den and we the bear cubs. Sometimes it was an Eskimo igloo. Once it came perilously close to becoming a tomb.
    The thick, insulated door latched on the outside. One day when four or five of us children were inside, someone slammed the door and we were locked in. The only illumination was a wan ray of light from a small ventilation shaft in the roof, which did little to lighten the clammy, chilly gloom.
    For a time we were excited by our predicament, seeing it as a novel adventure. But when nobody let us out and the cold began seeping through our thin summer clothing, we grew frightened.
    At seven years of age, Jack Kidd was the eldest. He drew us together in a shivering cluster just under the ventilation shaft and led us in a cry for help that soon degenerated into tearful howls. Although we yelled and cried ourselves hoarse, no one came. Nobody heard us because of the thick insulation in the ice-house walls.
    We huddled tightly together in the damp sawdust and the cold bit deeper into our bodies. For the first time in my life I felt terror. One of the little girls had buried her face in my neck and was sobbing bitterly. I was probably weeping too. I know that some of the nightmares which followed upon this incident (and did not cease until I was in my teens) made me cry so despairingly that I would wake with my face drenched in tears.
    By the greatest of good fortune, someone from a neighbouring cottage came by to get some ice, and released us. It was none too soon. One little boy had to be attended to by Dr. Farncombe for what would doubtless now be called hypothermia. I suffered no lasting ill effects but to this day grow uneasy in cold, dark places.
    I don’t think I went swimming during my first visit to the Kidds’ but a photograph taken in the summer of 1922 shows me sitting in the landwash up to my naked navel. By the time I was four, I could dog-paddle well enough to swim with the other children, unsupervised by any adult. We spent hours every day mucking about in the warm waters, chasing frogs, water snakes and crayfish. We did not mind when, in late August, the bay became awash with a floating green slush called Dog Days—an explosive “bloom” of green