ABSTRACT
My departures at 17 from my village and from the Kitchener-Waterloo Collegiate Institute were taken without reluctance. I took some satisfaction in the idea of being seen as being called away to cosmopolitan life, as becoming a member, one of the million or so members, of the great city of my country. Such was Toronto in 1950, in more eyes than my own. Montreal, although it challenged this claim, had the misfortune of being populated by French Canadians. Being a minority bent on maintaining their identity, they were intrinsically suspect. Their standing was further reduced by a useful store of our English folk-truths, one being that their French could not be understood in Paris. It is good to be able to say that nothing in the store was virulent. For example, it did not include the name Pepsi for a French Canadian. This, as I learned much later, was in use among Montrealers of another notable ethnicity, and was derived from what ignorant or penniless parents were purported to give their children in place of milk.
