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algae. I remember the joy of diving under and surfacing through it to emerge shrouded and streaked with tendrils of green slime like a water demon.
    Norman Kidd provided a little skiff for us. By the age of four I could row it handily. At five I rowed, all on my own, a half-mile offshore to Indian Island 3 —while Angus proudly cheered me on and Helen wrung her hands and bravely refrained from calling me back.
    Indian Island had earlier been known as Massacre Island in memory of a party of Hurons reputedly killed on it in the eighteenth century by an Iroquois raiding party. It was a place of delicious possibilities. I found bones (possibly human) washed out along its shores, and crayfish could be caught by flipping over the slippery flat stones in the surrounding shallows. Freshwater clams lurked in waters shoal enough for us to reach them and sometimes contained tiny “seed” pearls.
    Half- or altogether naked, I lived the life of a water baby during those halcyon days. In my father’s time, people who messed about by and in the waters of the bay proudly called themselves Bay of Quinte Bullfrogs. Regardless of where life was to later lead me, I believe I am at least entitled to style myself a Bay of Quinte Tadpole.
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    2 Inspired by a popular drinking song, “Little Brown Jug, oh I love thee.”
    3 the very same Indian Island under whose lee, according to Angus, I had been conceived. Was my conception calling to me?

 
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    TRENTON HAD BEEN A MAJOR port during the days of the timber trade and continued to prosper into the early twentieth century, shipping barley across Lake Ontario in big sailing vessels. However, by the 1920s the schooners were all gone, and only a few colliers still called, together with the occasional steam packet carrying freight and passengers between Toronto and Kingston.
    Sometimes when one of the packets puffed into harbour, Angus would take me aboard her. I was allowed to clamber around freely, both above and below decks, while he gabbed with officers and crew, some of whom he had known since his own childhood. Although I never felt any urge to become a sailor, my visits to the old vessels gave me an admiration for working ships and their people which still endures.
    On one occasion Angus and I shipped aboard the tug M. Sicken as guests of Captain Ben Bowen on a run from Trenton to Belleville. As we approached the Belleville bridge, I was the one who pulled the whistle lanyard to summon the bridge master to his appointed task. Small and shabby, for she was more than half a century old, the M. Sicken spewed black coal smoke like a volcano, coating herself and everything around her with gritty dust and ashes. But to me she was Leviathan.
    The M. Sicken may have been responsible for my first appearance in print. Having become enamoured of the Pooh books, I wrote a letter to Christopher Robin, enclosing a picture of myself dressed in a sailor’s suit standing on the M. Sicken ’s bridge. To everyone’s astonishment but mine, Christopher Robin replied. He had been much impressed by the M. Sicken, which he seems to have thought was my personal yacht. Our two letters were reprinted in the Trenton Courier, thereby giving me an early taste of literary notoriety.
    The west side of the harbour was dominated by the massive bulk of the cold storage plant whose four-square, windowless limestone walls towered like those of a mediaeval fortress. Built in the mid-nineteenth century to store apples and other perishable farm products awaiting onward shipment by water, the vast stone vault was by now largely abandoned and had acquired a forbidding air of decrepitude which irresistibly attracted youngsters. Exploring its dank recesses was as good as exploring the dungeons of a haunted castle.
    It also attracted the town drunks and ne’er-do-wells who used it as their club. Lolling at ease on piles of old sawdust, they consumed (when they couldn’t get