THE KID IN ME- BOOK ONE, A Childhood Autobiography by Peter Cluff

CHAPTER TWO- Meet the Parents

Peter’s parent’s marriage started off badly.

Within a week of Alberta Cole marrying Jim Cluff, the Canadian Army shipped him off to McGill University in Ottawa to await a posting overseas. He remained there for 3 months before they discharged him and shipped him back home to Woodstock, Ontario. His flat feet made it impossible for a man of his size to do the marching needed on the killing fields of Europe.

Jim was a tall handsome man, 6 foot two, and Alberta was a beautiful woman. But the discharge may have affected Jim more than anyone knew. For the rest of his life, he was occasionally silent and morose but regularly, his Irish temper flared up like an erupting volcano. Whenever Jim smiled, there was a touch of fear in his eyes. He was afraid that the thing that made him smile would come to a screeching demise at any second.

Early in their marriage, Jim and Alberta had 3 children between 1942 and 1945. James (Pat) was the oldest followed by Robert (Bud), then Peter.

When they brought Peter home from the Woodstock General Hospital following his birth on May 29, 1945, Bud told Alberta to take him back. Jim and Pat were silent.

Alberta first told Peter this story when he was four years old and many times after that. Bud always denied it vehemently. He was only 14 months old when Peter was born. He could not remember saying it and he certainly could not be held accountable for it. Alberta always took great pleasure in re-telling this tale over the years and the rest of the family wondered why. This made Peter grow closer to Bud and distanced him further from his mother.

Peter loved his Dad with all his heart and often felt pity for him because he could not afford any of the luxuries that Alberta wanted. Jim worked as an attendant in a mental hospital for 35 years without complaining about the job until he retired. Lord knows that he put up with some awful events at work but when he came home, it was usually worse.

Jim loved his job but he loved Alberta even more. Peter could see it in what Jim tried to do for her. Jim worked to get Alberta anything she wanted, including taking a second job as a gas-jockey at Stu McMillan’s Shell service station across the street from where they lived on Park Row. To do this, Jim had to work nights for 5 years straight at the hospital and then put in 5 hours at the gas station after grabbing a few hours sleep in the morning.

With three young energetic boys at home, sleep did not come easily for Jim. Most mornings when he got home from work at 7 AM, Alberta was waiting with a list of sins the boys had committed the night before. Her way of controlling them was to threaten “Just you wait until your Father gets home!”. After Alberta’s continuous demands that Jim do something, the brothers usually heard the words “Here we go again!” followed by Jim’s stomping up the stairs toward their bedroom.

The three brothers knew what was coming next. The yelling and the stomping were ample signals for Pat, Bud and Peter to grab magazines, books or extra clothes to hide beneath the bed covers as padding against the razor strap blows that would surely come next. Jim was fully aware of this ploy and many of his blows smacked against the thinly-padded books emitting just enough sound to satisfy Alberta that he was in fact hitting the boys. But, on more than one occasion, the boys did not move fast enough to protect themselves and walked hand-in-hand to school crying all the way.

It’s strange how that worked out. Peter loved his Dad even more, despite the beatings, and resented his mother’s pushing Jim to the brink of having to punish him and his brothers. They recognized early on that Alberta held the power and Jim was being used.

There was a good reason for Peter’s growing love for his Dad. Jim always made time to take the boys places like the circus, the ball field or the local Dairy Queen. He spent time with them playing catch in the yard or allowing them to help with yard work. He talked to his boys about interesting cases at the hospital and took them to see their grandfather in Seaforth.

The boys had a paper route that was handed down from one brother to the next. Jim was always there to help them deliver papers in the rain or just to show up at a subscriber’s home when they had difficulty collecting their paper money. He was big enough to qualify as “Gino the Kneecapper” but those that knew him saw only a big teddy bear.

When walking through crowds, Jim always hoisted little Peter up on his shoulders not only to give him a bird’s eye view but also to protect him from being trampled by the crowd.

Jim did boy things with the brothers and communicated with them about boy things.

Boys growing up in the 1940’s and 50’s were willing to forgive their fathers for disciplining them and even respected them more for having done it, as long as their Dad was involved in their lives.

Alberta was a different story altogether.

She became more and more self-absorbed, to the exclusion of her family. Her grocery list was different from the rest of the family- it included popular sweet things like the small individual boxes of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and Raisin Bran and others that Peter could not remember. The boys had to cook Quaker Oats, Red River Cereal or Cream of Wheat for every breakfast. To keep them from being late for school, Alberta insisted that the porridge be cooked the night before. By morning, it had a thick disgusting frog-skin covering it.

Alberta’s best friend was also her pharmacist and he catered to her every whim and pain. Eventually, she changed doctors because she regularly disagreed with his diagnosis of her mostly imagined sicknesses.

Once, she went shopping with Peter at the Metropolitan 5 & 10 and forgot him. He was 3 ½ years old and walked 2 miles home that day, while Alberta took the bus.

She changed churches from a plain one in the working class area of town to a more upscale one in the heart of town.

She always wanted a fur coat and got one eventually even though she had nowhere to wear it, except to her upscale church.

She discovered charge accounts and credit cards and made Jim’s life hell trying to earn enough to pay the bills. All the while, she harped at him for spending $5 on cigarettes and gas for the car.

Alberta always seemed to be trying to get to the other side of the tracks.

Things came to a head in 1955 when Peter was 10 years old. Jim was extremely concerned about Alberta’s growing self-medicating and wide mood fluctuations. He called a family meeting with Ken Oates, the minister from the church. Ten minutes into the meeting, Alberta accused everyone of ganging up on her, stormed to her bedroom and later that day, she half-heartedly attempted suicide by consuming alcohol and pills. She was not successful.

The family was never the same after that day. By that time, Peter had a 3 year-old sister, Frances, and he spent a lot of his time caring for her. Alberta spent increasing amounts of time in bed and her duties fell to Peter and his brothers.

One day, Alberta decided she wanted to become a nurse. Peter and his brothers spent even more time doing cooking, laundry, ironing, cleaning, babysitting and other household duties while Alberta went to school to become a Registered Nursing Assistant. To her credit and their relief, she graduated and landed a job at the Woodstock General Hospital.

While that would normally be a good thing, it became readily apparent to the rest of the family that Alberta had only gotten better access to information to help her increase the length of her list of imagined illnesses. Her diseases seemed to be increasing in both frequency and seriousness. It didn’t take long for her to start taking lengthy absences from work. Since it was a unionized job, she was protected for a long time from having to account for her actions. With an older semi-retired doctor and a pharmacist in her pocket, she was in self-medication heaven.

The marriage got very rocky and the arguments grew louder and more frequent. Money or Bud always seemed to be the root of the problem. The high point happened one winter night, again in 1955. Peter remembers Alberta dressing up Frances in a blue snowsuit, with a white scarf around her face, standing in the living-room doorway threatening to leave Jim. Alberta was yelling, Jim was yelling and Frances was crying uncontrollably while clenching and unclenching her tiny hands in the air toward Peter. At just over a year old, she had no idea what was happening, except that it was loud and angry. Peter was 10 years old standing on the opposite side of the room pleading with his mom not to leave home. As usual, no one seemed to hear him.

Jim and Alberta did not realize the huge impact this scene had on Peter. He saw a mother who was prepared to walk out the door and leave him. He saw a father who was helpless and gave in to his wife- once again. While this situation blew over in a couple of days, Peter now understood what his mother had been saying for so many years- “I’m raising you to be independent.” So Peter decided not to depend on his mother for the rest of his life.

Three years later, Jim and Alberta had their last child, a daughter Ruthie. Peter could never understand how they conceived her. His parents hardly saw each other. They were like two ships passing in the night; Jim worked nights and Alberta worked days. Alberta had explained “the birds and the bees” in pretty graphic detail to Peter when he was just 7 years old, so he knew that his parents needed at least 20 minutes together in order to make a baby. Peter could not remember when they spent twenty minutes together in private.

As the marriage rocked on, Jim and Alberta grew into their fifties and were confronted by the needs of two teenage daughters. They were totally unprepared for this challenge and did not have the benefit of having the older boys at home to help. Pat joined the Army at 16 and Bud left home at 17 to stay with a friend’s family about a mile from the family home. This was a huge slap in the face for Alberta but Jim was just plain sad. Now there were only Peter and his sisters at home to distract Jim from Alberta’s demands.

Before he left home, Bud had already been at war with his mother for years. He was olive-skinned with black hair and deep brown eyes. Pat and Pete were relatively pale in comparison and had brown hair. Peter had blue eyes and Pat’s were light brown. There was a running family joke that Bud was the product of a tryst between Alberta and the milkman. Alberta called Bud the “Black Sheep of the Family” to anyone who would listen, even if he was standing there listening. He would rebel against everything that Alberta asked, even if it was reasonable.

When Bud left home, Peter was almost 16 and was left to handle everything to do with his sisters that Alberta wouldn’t and Jim couldn’t do.