Barry Conn Hughes

The Trombone Casea memoir

Our parents were of the genteel poor. So it was that the trombone case — with its rude utilitarian role surrounded by a certain aura of glamour — was not entirely out of place during their northern periods. Not to put too fine a point on it, the trombone case was a receptacle for the waste from the toilet on the railway dental car where they lived and worked in the late 1950s. Old railwaymen called them honey buckets or teapots, but I think Dad’s euphemism was more visually apt. It was a section of stovepipe, painted black, a handle welded to the side, with a fluted and sealed bottom.

The trombone case was an essential accoutrement for private railway cars, since they often stood for some time on a siding. There were only a few private cars in Canada in those days and these custom-made devices were highly prized, more jealously guarded than the steps that conductors used on the platform.

Without one, you faced unspeakable and odoriferous consequences. With one, you could from time to time quietly haul it out from under the car and dump it in a ditch at some respectable distance down the track.

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Those who remember trains are probably familiar with the old ditty: Passengers will please refrain / From flushing toilets while the train / Is standing at the station being refuelled .

Our parents would not, however, have descended to bathroom humour.

Dad was the son of a clergyman; Mom was the daughter of a public school inspector. Dad was a dentist and Mom a graduate dietician who had practiced briefly before marrying and raising three sons.

I remember, in early days, somewhat threadbare linen napkins curled into individual rings. Not being able to leave the table without a "Please, may I be excused?" A little silver tray in the front hall for visiting cards. Weekly church and Sunday school. During the war, Dad in the Reserve Army as a Bofors gunner and Mom doing Good Works for the Imperial Order, Daughters of the Empire. I can rarely recall Dad without a shirt and tie, even at our rustic cottage.

Still, life with our parents was not as fusty and dusty as you might imagine.

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Although it was never mentioned, we boys learned that Dad had saved a little girl from drowning in Lake Huron; a small medal found in a drawer testified that Mom had won it for sharpshooting in college. They took us along on a wedding anniversary trip to Toronto, where in happy consanguinity all five of us crowded into one room at the King Eddy Hotel.

Dutifully and honestly, they voted against each other in every election for more than 40 years. They were amused, yes, but flattered even more, when we apple-pied their bed one night.

In 1947 Dad’s bad back dictated a move to a less demanding practice in a small Ontario village. We were vaguely aware that many of Dad's patients could not afford much, and as the eldest I did notice that the summer kitchen was filling with jars of pickles in lieu of payment. They didn’t discuss finances; we were not concerned.

I suspect but do not know for certain that we were deliberately born three years apart, so that only one of us would be in college at a given time. While we all graduated, each failed a year, which certainly fouled up that scheme. One by one, we left home.

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Devastated by the education of three sons, with an unremunerative practice and a large old house that cost a fortune to heat, Mom and Dad had problems. Dad read the dental journal faithfully , having contributed a short item himself: “Things are quiet here in Coldwater. Today I only had two patients, Morley Yon and Sam Sleep.” He saw an invitation from the Ontario Department of Health for a dentist and assistant to provide free dental service in Northern Ontario, on a railway car along the Canadian National line running from Quebec to the Manitoba border. (There was another one on the Canadian Pacific line.)

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A two-year salaried stint would free them from the house, put them in the black and possibly give Dad a modest pension if he continued with the government service in a hospital.

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They were aware that most of the patients would be Indian children who had never received professional dental care, which they decided would be both interesting and useful. How better to save yourself than by serving others? Our parents, in their late fifties, grasped the opportunity. They sold the house and embarked on their adventure.

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Starting our careers and occupied with our own concerns, we didn't quite appreciate the magnitude of what they were doing, They did not appear to have changed. The first time I went to the then frightening Soviet Union as a journalist, in 1957, Mom had said, “Be sure you bring your galoshes.” Did I only imagine that she was crying when the plane took off?

Barely a year later, Dad was the roving dentist of the north while Mom earned something close to the minimum wage as his assistant.

Their new home had been built in 1913 for the Canadian Northern Railway. In 1951, as the Canadian National sleeping car "Camrose", it was converted to a dental car.

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Entering from the private end of the car, you encountered a compact kitchen, a living/dining room, and the master bedroom with a tiny shower bath. A narrow corridor led to the operating room, a little lab opposite an X-ray darkroom, a guest or nurse's compartment and the patients' waiting room at the public end.

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Mom's brother, my Uncle John, was an officer of a stockbroking firm in the city and was aghast to find they proposed to breach what he considered to be the outer reaches of civilisation. He went to a pet shop in Toronto where, having been assured that budgies could be made to talk, he bought them one for company.

Dad hung the cage in the operating room. Seized with a truly great idea, he spent months trying to teach the budgie to say "Open wide!,” To the best of my knowledge, the bird kept its trap shut for the entire two years.

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Our parents were hardly characters in our eyes, but perhaps their innate gentility made them so in that particular milieu. In any event, they got along well with the rugged and independent northerners.

Some lived in the north because they had to; others because they chose to. One of the latter was a public health nurse called Miss. Gribble-Giles. As if it weren't enough for someone so wonderfully yclept, her hobby was riding moose. If she spotted a moose swimming in a remote lake, Gribble-Giles would leap from her canoe and plunge into the water, grasping its antlers and riding along until it came near the shore and it was time to return to the safety of her craft.

One favoured patient was an otherwise unremarkable Indian lad whose name was Romeo Skunk. Dad would never tease somebody about his name, but he took note. The following February he sent Mom a Valentine's Day card signed Romeo Skunk. Apparently it was a while before she realised it was one of Dad's little jokes.

When they weren't working or visiting these entrancing new friends, they would entertain the children, the stationmaster and his wife, the local minister or school teacher with a tour of the premises. The dental car was, after all, quite an attraction.

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But they were often lonely. They had no television and radio reception in the north was poor. Mom and Dad played Scrabble night after night. On one of my visits I saw the cumulative scoresheet, which had reached into the hundreds of thousands. They read a lot. They went for long walks along the tracks, adopting an odd, truncated gait made necessary by the distance between the ties.

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They didn't go near any large community with a dentist, serving only the isolated settlements. They'd spend perhaps a couple of weeks on a siding taking care of the schoolchildren rounded up by principal or priest, and then have a passing train haul them to the next stop along the line.

Dad had been issued with a pass covering him, Mom and the railway car itself, giving them in effect the freedom of the C.N. system within the province. I think they once even went to Winnipeg for repairs. There were frequent breakdowns, almost invariably in the harshest conditions.

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Still, they thought it was pretty nifty being able to travel without leaving their own living room.

On the first occasion that Dad was entitled to use his pass to go south to Toronto for the dental convention, he had the stationmaster flag down a train, and the engineer had time to shunt the cars around and put the dental car at the end so they wouldn't be disturbed.

The second time, on their holiday, they ended up in the middle of the train. Mom was in her dressing gown when a fellow in a white jacket passed by ringing a bell and crying, “First call for dinner!” She retreated to the bedroom and locked the door, most affronted.

We remember these little family stories, but Mom and Dad are gone now. The only concrete things we have mow from their railway days are a photo of Mom in front of the dental car hugging two little Indian girls who appear to be blind, and a long list in Mom's handwriting detailing cavities.

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Not long ago, for sentimental reasons, I tracked down the old Car No. 15095. It had been taken out of service sometime in the midi-1970s, replaced by a small fleet of mobile homes. Languishing on a track at Queen's Quay in Toronto for some years, it had been abused by vagrants, trashed by vandals and stripped of its brass and copper fittings.

In 1989, farmer and former railwayman John Weir of Carleton Place bought the dental car, for $1,000. It cost him another $10,000 to have it shipped on a flatcar to a track outside the Railway Museum at Smiths Falls, Ont., where he is painstakingly restoring it to what it was when it was a working dental car.

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Well, not exactly. I didn't notice the trombone case.

But John Weir was pretty darn surprised to meet someone who knew the car, especially when I told him I had actually spent a Christmas Eve on it.

That Christmas, the three sons gathered at the only family home we now had, a 9-ton olive and black car in the Spadina Yards which snaked and laddered for some distance west of Union Station in Toronto.

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Bill and Dick had places to bunk down on Christmas Eve but I had not, as I was working for a small newspaper located many miles away. So I got to stay in the spare compartment.

We spent a pleasant evening. Mom talked about the delightful names of some of the stations they had visited, like Moonbeam. Dad grumped that Opesatica sounded like a dread disease and that the dreary town of Driftwood might better have been called Flotsam. He said that at some places they couldn’t hook up to steam heat, and that he often had to go out in freezing weather to drag propane tanks from the boxcar and sling them into place under the dental car. Which did not help his much-abused back.

He grinned. I realized then that they were totally, absolutely in love with what they were doing.

I slept well in the guest compartment, that night in the railway yards, but when I awoke I had the feeling I'd been knocked about. Dad confirmed this, saying we had been shunted overnight to a spot where they could be picked up easily for the trip back north.

As I was packing and beginning to make my farewells, Dad said: “Oh, my heavens, the trombone case!”

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It must have been bumped over and lost in the shunting of the previous night.

We were a long way from our earlier site and Mom said the yard engine was on its way to pick them up. Dad and I ran down the tracks to retrieve the trombone case and found it battered but unbowed. We wheeled and galloped back, huffing and puffing and taking turns carrying the infernal thing.

Finally we reached the dental car, just when the engine was pulling it away. Dad hopped up and I handed him the trombone case. He clutched it to his chest. Mom in her white uniform waved gaily. I stood by the tracks catching my breath as my parents left.

It was, as far as these things went in our family, a rather touching moment.

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