This will cover the period roughly from the summer of 1956 to the fall of 1959, when I went off to Kingston to start my post-secondary schooling at Queen's University. The dates are approximate, as best I can remember, but I believe that I had spent the spring term in London living with Roger Holland and his parents in Kensington and attending Sloane Grammar School in Chelsea for the one term - roughly from Easter until the end of June, when summer holidays started. Our last couple of months in London had been in a flat with my parents and Michal at 54 Tite Street, in a building which had once housed Oscar Wilde. I think this locale may also have been owned by the Czech Refugee Trust Fund at that time, but that's conjecture.
We travelled back to Canada on RMS (Royal Mail Ship) Empress of Canada, a Canadian Pacific Steamships vessel, which served the Liverpool to Montreal passenger market at that time with a two week turnaround. The voyage must have been dull, as I have effectively no recollection of it, not even the docking in Montreal, where we must have been met by one of Mother's friends - probably Míma Bala. For some unknown reason we did not stay with Balas at the time, but were put up in a more suburban area - Ville St. Laurent - by a childless couple whose surname was Klusáček. They had a very successful business selling women's hats - called "French Feathers". I have lost track of them as I have no recollection of being in touch with them again during the time we lived in Ottawa. In any event, we must have stayed only long enough to get our bearings and embarked for Ottawa by train, where we were met by a local realtor, a small, balding Slovak named Imre Rosenberg, who must have been known to the Balas.
He took us to a fairly central location where we rented an apartment at 327 Catherine Street, on the second floor of a tacky older house in an industrial area with a railway track along the north side, roughly where Queensway is now. That was the start of my three years at Glebe Collegiate Institute, one of Ottawa's four Anglophone public high schools at the time (Glebe, Lisgar, Nepean, and Fisher Park). Since Glebe was the closest high school to the flat Mother had rented, I was sent there for an interview, and must have impressed the school officials sufficiently that they placed me in grade 11 where my classmates were mostly two years older than me. I considered this a favorable achievement at the time, though now I wonder if it was truly beneficial, as I missed out on the study of Canadian history, and felt isolated from my peers.
One incident I remember well is when the coal silo a hundred or so metres west of us (on the north side of Catherine Street - it looked much like an old grain elevator) burned down. It was a spectacular fire which the fire brigade simply contained, and made no attempt to douse it. It was right around the time the railways all converted to diesel, so it might even have been a convenient insurance claim.
The Ontario high school curriculum was not difficult to accept and adjust into. The academic subjects were much the same as what I had encountered in the British system, albeit some of the names differed. The teaching seemed to me to be more focused, and indeed it was intended to prepare one for the Province-wide matriculation exams, which were the key to career choice and advanced education if applicable. In Grade 11 we had a fixed schedule and no language choices; grade 12 was when Latin could be dropped in favour of a modern language: French was mandatory even back then. Mathematics (or math in Canada, maths in Britain) was by then focused on algebra, with descriptive geometry in grade 12 and trigonometry in grade 13. I found all of them relatively undemanding, so I decided that my aptitude led to applied science. In spite of not being fully science oriented, after going on an introductory trip to Kingston, I opted to aim for the engineering faculty at Queen's University.
It was during this period that the apparently irreparable relationship between my parents became clearly evident, as they had managed to keep it fairly well hidden up to this time. I don't recall the layout of the Catherine Street apartment, but it was fairly small, and I think that John, and I shared a room, and Michal was with Mother, as the adults slept apart. I have no idea how the family finances were arranged, as they were simply not discussed or revealed to our generation, except in the ways we maintained our meagre lifestyle. However, it could not have been long before the family was presented an opportunity to purchase a lot in a new subdivision, and somehow my parents managed to put together enough for a downpayment to build a basic four bedroom, two story home at 639 Chadburn Avenue in Riverview Park, as the new locale became known. This was no longer walking distance to my school, Glebe, but bus service was reasonable, and since Mother was working a Ottawa Civic Hospital as an admitting clerk at the time, she was able to schedule her day to drive me at least one way much of the time.
It was at this time that our friends in Montreal, Karel and Vera (Míma) Bala (ex Balenburger) who were very supportive of our circumstances, arranged for me to go on a fishing expedition in Algonquin Park with their old friend, and Karel's colleague from Czech diplomatic service, Vladimir Moudry, fondly known as Mudrc (pronounced moodrts with the short double "o" as in foot). He was a 49 year old bachelor, whom the Balas wanted to fix up with Mother, and they certainly succeeded. Mudrc lived in Toronto, where he had a small house at 165 Winona Drive - off St. Clair Avenue, one of the major east-west thoroughfares northeast of downtown. He and Mother hit it off instantly - to the point where upon our return from the fishing trip they were writing at length to each other daily (bearing in mind that intercity phoning was expensive, and instant communication otherwise was unavailable to private individuals, and early computers with names like UNIVAC consumed vast resources).
