Constable Ted Scott: Crossing the tracks, Georgetown, Ontario, circa 1960

Constable Ted Scott: Crossing the tracks, Georgetown, Ontario, circa 1960

Growing up in the Swanick subdivision of Georgetown, Ontario, in the late 1950s and early 1960s was rich in experiences of all sorts, including numerous rituals that are indelibly branded in my depleting bank of memories.

One such ritual entailed “crossing the tracks.”

I went to Chapel Street Public School. The conventional and approved route from our house on Elizabeth Street to this tiny institute of learning seemed long and circuitous to us Swanick kids: up the Ewing Street hill, left past Archie’s convenience store and over the railway bridge on Guelph Street, then left again down an access street lined with chestnut trees, before reaching our destination: the shining school on the hill, long ago erased.

This always seemed a formidable trek to us kids, especially since there was a popular short cut, which involved crossing the railway tracks intersecting the town.

This is where Constable Ted Scott came in, every year, perhaps twice a year, invading our classroom to warn us of the many perils lurking in our seemingly peaceful community, including dangerous drivers and the specter of electrocution. (My parents and Constable Scott routinely highlighted the electrocution menace by pointing to a lad we knew only as “the breadman’s boy” who had one good arm and one stub, the loss of limb apparently due to his messing with high voltage wires.)

But the kindly constable saved his most dire warnings for “crossing the tracks.” It was as though he was in cahoots with my father, a Canadian National Railway employee, who would bludgeon my sister and me with tales of track crossers whose feet would get caught in the railway ties, leaving them ensnared like pitiful rodents until a train came along and… well, you can guess the rest.

Constable Scott stressed the danger element of course but would also warn us that beetling over the rails made us “trespassers.” (When the constable first visited us kids, probably in first grade, I thought trespassing was linked to eternal perdition in the incandescent inferno of Hell, since the term was only familiar from the Lord’s Prayer, repeated by the fire and brimstone minister at our St. John’s United Church.)

These ominous admonitions notwithstanding, we crossed the tracks pretty much every day, rain or shine, come hell or cold weather, through or over the barbed wire fence that was meant to deter such delinquency.

And we had access to the permeable cordon by way of the back yard of my good friend John Blair, whose house abutted the tracks.

So like prisoners escaping Alcatraz, we naughty mites would lift up or climb over the fence, or squeeze through a treacherously prickly hole where previous pint-sized hooligans had pried open the wire and stretched it out of shape.

For me there was one major problem: I was both quite chubby and terminally clumsy, so invariably a dead weight for the nimble offenders who formed our gang.

I would inevitably get ensnarled in the wire, impaled like the little Scotsman in the film The Great Escape, trapped in the Stalag, while my friends slipped across the tracks like slithering silverfish, without looking back.

Constable Scott be damned!

Your friend,
Robert

Robert McBryde – robertmcbrydeauthor.com