The house was not like some of the grander ones in Toronto which aspired to be southern mansions or Tudor manor houses. And we were middle class, perhaps even upper-middle class, although Canadian society did not like to reflect on such gradations. Our father had come home from the war, and Canada seemed far away from the trouble and war-torn parts of the world. We were privileged although it took us some time to realize it. Only later did we understand that stood for Displaced Persons who might have survived in an occupied Holland or who had memories of fleeing the Russian troops in the centre of Europe. Sometimes the mothers had help, young women emigrating from the British Isles - who soon found they could get better jobs in the shops and offices and factories of a booming postwar economy - or what we called in those days DPs. Like all the fathers in the Toronto of the 1940s and 1950s he went out to work every day and she, like almost all the mothers, ran the household. It was my father’s, too, of course because they had been a partnership from the moment he knocked her down outside the University of Toronto Medical School, but it was, always, her domain.
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