A tale of three cafeterias revisited: London, Ontario; Burnaby, British Columbia; Quebec City, 1965-2000
While reading Orwell’s seminal novel 1984 in university, I was struck by the grungy canteen scene, which prompted recollections of the cafeteria of my high school, Oakridge, in 1960s London, Ontario.
George Orwell – 1984 – Part 1, Chapter 5
Now obviously the Oakridge eatery was not nearly so grimy, nor the fare so revolting, as the setting and comestibles depicted in Orwell’s renowned satire, but our school cafeteria was not exactly a gourmet haven. It was a raucous place, strewn with wrappers, besmirched with slop, and festooned with brown paper bags and various and sundry detritus.
We students routinely devoured all sorts of delectable delights, lining up for what seemed like hours to purchase the cornerstones of any nutritious North American lunch, including my preferred daily staples, i.e. little cartons of ultra-sweet lemonade, leaky fudgsicles, and cellophane-wrapped Joe Louis type cakes.
During this era of top-notch nutrition, my wife was attending junior and senior high in Burnaby B.C. A recent arrival in Canada, having landed on our shores as a refugee from Communist Czechoslovakia in 1968, she was acutely embarrassed by the bagged lunch prepared by her mother and composed of old-country fare, namely sandwiches featuring heavy rye bread, thick delicatessen ham, and smelly ancestral cheese, which she would routinely trade for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches concocted by her friends’ old-stock Canadian moms.
She also used her precious pocket money to procure the aforementioned lemonade, along with chocolate eclairs, and her personal favourite and daily staple: salt and vinegar potato chips (Hostess or Old Dutch).
Fast forward to the late 1970s, when I began my 35-year teaching career at St. Lawrence, a CEGEP (junior college) in Quebec City.
In those bygone days, stepping into the world of Quebec City was like being trapped on a temporal rewind reel or peering into a rearview mirror and experiencing déjà vu, especially as regards smoking, what my mother called “the filthy habit.” Whereas the anti-smoking militias had been making considerable inroads elsewhere in North America, in the provincial capital of la nation québécoise the tar-and-nicotine brigade continued to hold the upper hand, circa 1980. Indeed, being a member of Quebec’s surging independence movement practically required a solemn pledge of tobacco addiction. The iconic figures of the Parti québécois government, from revered premier Rene Levesque to esteemed finance minister Jacques Parizeau on down, chain-smoked with the same smoldering intensity they brought to bear when addressing the weighty issues bedeviling Quebec society, such as how to legislate the French language translation of onion bhajis or hula hoops.
Although not sharing the political proclivities of these august political leaders, when it came to “butting in” the administrators, faculty members, and staff at our college more than matched the wizened, sallow, and smoke-stained PQ luminaries, hack for phlegmy hack and puff for sooty puff. The entire school was fully equipped with wall-to-wall cigarette disposal amenities, and faculty meetings featured a vast array of delivery systems for tar and nicotine, including pipes, cigarillos, and those roll-your-own coffin nails known as rollies, as well as a wide range of more conventional gaspers.
The cultural warfare around the portentous issue of butting in and butting out came to a fulminating head at a faculty meeting in the early 1990s. A student spokesperson with the wonderfully appropriate name of Karl Tabak dared to propose that the school restrict smoking in the cafeteria, where every scrumptious meal was permeated by ubiquitous billowing tobacco pollution and thus tasted like an ultra-stinky version of Swedish smoked eel. Mr. Tabak’s intrepid intervention calling for a non-smoking section to be established in the institutional mess hall caused a colossal ruckus and led one waggish faculty member, a devoted high priest and purveyor of the tobacco cult, to propose a tongue-in-cheek compromise motion, to wit that all smokers would become non-smokers during faculty assembly, if all non-smokers would become smokers. There was a call for the vote and the motion nearly carried the day!
As the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard pointed out, nothing is more dangerous than to recollect. Ruminating upon the long-lost days described herein, I feel myself yielding to the deceptive lure of nostalgia, longing to return to a world more innocent, more familiar, pining for the simple battle lines that were drawn and redrawn again… before going up in smoke. For me, the flame of the past is flickering, and the future is butting out.
When a lovely flame dies
Smoke gets in your eyes
– Song by The Platters
Your friend,
Robert
Robert McBryde – robertmcbrydeauthor.com
