Sunday, February 9, 2020
The CBC TV series "Back in Time for Winter," narrated by a man with a British accent, for no apparent reason, puts a modern family back in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. I watched my first episode of this a "golly gee" sneer-fest against 1940s domestic habits. I wasn't born in the forties but these things from the episode were in my life, too.
The tv mom didn't recognize the beef heart she was to stuff with bread pieces and fry in lard, but I remember eating beef heart, other organs, and moose organs when wild meat came from someone, sometimes one of my mother's two brothers. They all grew up in the forties, and during the war the meat rationing sent good meat to the military and left many people with organ meat.
The flip-up toaster is new to the family too, and although my younger sister for awhile used such a toaster a couple decades ago, when pop-up toasters dominated, she and I both remember the flip-up toaster that Ernie and Berta Fowler had on their farm a few kilometres north of our place north of Edson, Alberta. As I child, I thought it was magic, and that was the only place I ever saw lemon spread. My siblings, cousins, and I would usually fall asleep sitting against one another on the couch, or on a chair, or on the floor in the living room, near the pot-bellied stove. It was so warm, making the blast of cold air seem colder on our drowsy faces when we walked out of the house to drive home with Mom and Dad.
The tv dad rubs a cake of wax on a toboggan for the family to use on a hill. We painted tar on our wooden cross-country skis, heated it on the ski over a burner of the gas stove in the house which neighbors hauled from Edson for my granny in 1953, and rubbed the tar in with a cloth. Then we rubbed wax on the skis, which we rubbed in with cork, in the 1970s. Like the dad and daughters in the episode, we dressed in layers, and I still dress in layers on cold winter days.
The tv mom makes bran muffins with prunes, which I made in Whitecourt in 1982-83, using prunes from the Mayerthorpe Co-Op which I bought on Wednesdays, the day I delivered Whitecourt newspapers to the town's post office 45 km from Whitecourt. Dad had been a 1930s Mayerthorpe teenager. I covered Mayerthorpe and Whitecourt news for the paper all those decades later. A old woman who wrote a column for the paper told me she remembered Dad from the 1930s, and I mentioned that link in the paper. I'd cut the flesh off the prunes and suck on the pits while I made the muffins. The day the paper hired me, my 21st birthday, the editor fed me lunch at the Whitecourt Motor Inn. I had liver and onions.
The tv family had a wringer washer, a mystery to all family members, but more luxurious than the one I had in my Fort Providence, Northwest Territories Hudson's Bay Northern Stores staff house in 1986-87. Both machines filled from hoses attached to the kitchen sink tap, but they emptied theirs into pails which they poured down the sink; I emptied mine into a square plastic bin about a foot by a foot by three feet tall, and dragged it outside to dump in front of my house, which was about 100 metres from the Mackenzie River. The episode didn't show them hanging the clothes, they having no dryer. I had no dryer, so I attached a clothesline to a a corner of my house and a corner of the covered porch of my house, which was the old Bay store from the 1920s.
An Indigenous man teaches the tv dad how to ice fish. Dad catches nothing but the man gives him a trout. I didn't and I don't like to fish, but my in-laws ice fish. My spouse's dad's cousin gave me a fresh trout when I lived and taught in her community of Kluskus for six weeks from February-March, 2004, while the regular teacher was in Fairview, Alberta recovering from pneumonia. My spouse taught me how to clean a salmon, including cutting off the fins and removing the entrails. The tv mom makes a potato-trout cassarole, and the narrator, with his British accent as sneering as the whiny tv family, notes that cassaroles helped stretch meat. My mom made cassaroles, especially with that rarest of fish, salmon, which we got in a can once or twice per year, usually during Lent. The tv mom fed five. My mom fed 10 for a couple years. Mom liked modern conveniences, having grown up, rural not urban as in the tv show, in the thirties and forties, no cutesy era of playing poor for fun and condescension, but an era of eking out a hard living. Dad grew up poor, too. Film that, CBC, with a narrator who sounds like a Canadian, not like a British overlord among the colonials. Film how Indigenous people lived, when they weren't allowed off their reserves without Indian Agent permission, weren't allowed in bars, and were in brutalizing schools while people, including me, made fun of them. How about an APTN series to reply to CBC's white whitewash? Instead, as more than one Indigenous person has told me, "Why bother?"
The "mom in the kitchen, dad outside" division of labor might have been true of middle class families of the forties, but my parents weren't raised middle class. I suppose I was, but I've many of their habits, as the above rant suggests. Mom worked in an Edson restaurant when she and Dad met in the late-40s. Dad helped in the kitchen, especially with dishes, while I grew up in the sixties and seventies. There's a revisionist anti-feminist tone in the show, as if to say that none were feminist then and all are now: two falsehoods.
I suppose the show is aimed at people younger than I, who are full of the prejudice that the current era of screens and texting proves the young now are better than those radio-listening, letter-writing primitives of the 1940s. I like screens and email, but I also like radio and letters. This show's as stereotyped as the futuristic shows of my youth, in which people ride flying cars and wear spacesuits, but those shows were guesswork, while this one could represent history honestly and respectfully, if it chose. I suppose each era promotes its vision of the future, and of the past.
I wonder how Antonio Gramsci or Howard Zinn would see "Back in Time for Winter."
What more vituperation will pour from me if I watch another episode of this series? Stay tuned, or don't.
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