CHAPTER THREE

School Years:Scarfing Down Puddings

1825–29

“I had no boyhood,” John A. Macdonald once said, looking back on his early years. “From the age of fifteen, I began to earn my own living.”⁴ It was an uncharacteristic lament, for although John A. was subject to occasional despair, he was usually high-spirited and frequently turned his sharp sense of humour upon himself.

In fact, it is true that his boyhood was marred by witnessing the murder of his younger brother, as well as by his father’s drinking and business failures, which brought intermittent poverty to the family and frequent moves. At a young age he was sent to Kingston to attend school, which was not so uncommon. Few in the new colonies had an easy life, and many had it as bad or worse. Many young men had to grow up in a hurry and help support their families. Only a very few, from the wealthiest families, attended university, and often they were sent to Britain.

John A. had one advantage throughout most of his life that helped override everything else: he had the unconditional love and support of his mother — a fact that almost every one of his many biographers has commented upon. Helen Shaw Macdonald was solid in every sense of the word. A stout, practical woman, she was devoted to her family. Helen Macdonald was selfless and intelligent with an excellent memory and a droll sense of humour. She was also lively and spontaneous and possessed of a great sense of fun. Once, upon hearing bagpipes coming down the road, Helen ran out of the house and danced a jig in the street. Throughout her life, her children remained devoted to her, and many episodes of John A.’s life can be put together from his ongoing correspondence with his mother. Later in his life, John A. always kept a photograph of her close at hand.

In 1824, the family moved again, this time to Glenora in Prince Edward County, where Hugh bought a mill. For a time the family enjoyed some financial stability while the mill provided at least enough income for Hugh and Helen Macdonald to begin to save a bit of money.

Despite lamenting about his boyhood years, John was by all accounts a good-natured boy, always quick with a joke or a pun or a practical joke. He took pleasure in reading, enjoyed company, and loved his sisters. He was not immune, though, to enjoying a bit of teenaged trouble-making. As one of his friends said of him, “There wasn’t much fun that John A. wasn’t up to.”⁵ Once, upon heading home from some late night activities in Kingston, Macdonald and his friends noticed the roadway was covered in limestone pieces in preparation for making a street. It was one o’clock in the morning — late enough that the city was cloaked in darkness and still early enough that the group of lads had energy to spare.

Macdonald immediately took charge: he figured that the stone could be used to create a decent sized wall. Scanning the immediate area, he pointed out grocer Jemmy Williamson’s doorway.

“It would not look amiss with a nice new stone front added to it,” he said.⁶

For two hours, in near complete silence, the boys removed every stone from the roadway and built a wall, seven feet long and eight feet high, entirely blocking Jemmy Williamson’s front door. Then, before they headed home, the boys threw stones at the upstairs windows. Williamson eventually woke up, came downstairs, and threw open his door only to be confronted by the wall of stone. He was heard crying out, “My God! What sin have I committed that this horror should fall upon me?” — at which point John A. and his chums scampered off to find their beds.

Macdonald passed the store the next day and found the wall gone. Later on in his life, he recalled the incident, saying that if he hadn’t read about it in the newspaper, he would have thought the whole thing a dream.⁷

One night, John A. and his friends were out walking through the village of Picton when, to their great delight, they found a dead horse. They propped the horse up in the pulpit of the local Methodist Church and waited for the elderly sexton to enter the church to light the lamps. When the unsuspecting sexton saw the animal, hooves upon the pulpit, he ran screaming from the building, claiming that he’d seen the devil himself. The local constable was brought in and promptly called up the usual suspects, including the young John A. Macdonald.

Another time John A. and his friends erected a fence across the Main Street of Picton in order to stop a horse and driver who routinely galloped through town. They were performing a public service, they thought. The horse was maimed, and a suspect who had nothing to do with the case was on the verge of conviction when John A.’s conscience got the better of him, and he came forward and confessed. Somehow he managed to get away with a mere reprimand. It was said that, in later years, this episode served John A. as a reminder of the dangers of circumstantial evidence.

The pranks, however, were not restricted to late-night practical jokes with his mates. Once, his sisters, Louisa and Margaret, and a friend of theirs were about to head off for an afternoon row on Lake Ontario when John A. noticed they had climbed aboard the boat without the oars. He grabbed the opportunity to shove the boat off the shore, casting them adrift in the lake. The girls yelled and shouted until their mother came to see what the fuss was about. Luckily for John A., the wind brought the girls back to shore without incident.

On another occasion, John A. and his sisters were playing soldiers — as they often did — with John A. playing captain and assigning various duties to the girls. Louisa refused to play along, which caused John A. to grab a gun from the wall and point it at her head, threatening to shoot her if she did not comply. It was Margaret who intervened and took the gun away. Only later was it discovered by their father that the gun was loaded.

Despite his antics, or perhaps because of them, Hugh and Helen Macdonald decided to spend a good portion of their savings to send John A. to Kingston to attend the Midland District Grammar School, where the headmaster, Reverend John Wilson, was a fellow of the University of Oxford. Helen viewed John’s education as an investment in the family’s future, for she never once doubted that he had great potential. So the Macdonalds paid the seventy pounds annual tuition, and John boarded with his friend, Charles Stuart, in the house of two elderly ladies at 110 Rideau Street, in Kingston.

During his school years in Kingston, the young John A. was a regular visitor at the Macphersons’ house, where the Macdonald family had stayed on their arrival in Kingston. John was said to have been drawn by his uncle’s library and by the pudding saved for him by Macphersons’ youngest daughter, who was said to be delighted with her cousin’s capacity for scarfing down slices of pudding and fairy cakes.⁸

 

A PENCHANT FOR PUDDINGS

Baked, boiled, or steamed puddings were immensely popular in the nineteenth century, and few dinners were complete without one. There were the classics, such as jam roly poly, bread pudding, plum pudding, and rice pudding, and there were staples, such as ginger, apple, and Indian pudding, which was made of cornmeal.

Baked or steamed puddings were generally heavy, starchy desserts, often containing suet or butter, and flour, rice, or cornmeal. They were useful for filling hungry families and were a practical way to stretch out small amounts of expensive ingredients, such as sugar, eggs, spices, and butter, and fresh, dried, or preserved fruit.

Bread pudding was made from leftover stale bread. The dessert is known in almost every culture around the world in some guise, and the first known British version appeared in the literature in John Nott’s Cook’s and Confectioner’s Dictionary of 1723. Almost all early North American cookbooks had at least one recipe for bread pudding and some had several, often varied by calling for dried fruit, including currants, raisins, and citron. The version below is from The Cook Not Mad, 1831.

 

One pound of bread, scald milk and turn on when cut in pieces, four ounces of butter, the same of sugar, four eggs, cinnamon and nutmeg, bake without paste [pastry].