Snarchland: Neil Cameron's My First Montreal Apartment

   Neil Cameron is a retired professor and former Equality Party MNA. He now lives in NDG  and gives lecture around town on historical subjects, he's a spellbinding raconteur and a good guy.
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   As a Queen's student, I had visited Montreal several times briefly by 1960 and had decided I wanted to live here.
   I arrived permanently in May 1962, in the midst of a severe recession.. The only person I knew in the city was a fellow Westerner, who put me up for a few days in the grubby little apartment he had found on Jeanne Mance, just above Milton. When he left the city shortly afterwards, I stayed with the same landlord, just moving to a building across the street.
   The recession made my move to an unfamiliar city more adventurous than I had anticipated. I had imagined I could pick up a white collar job, but few were to be had. I could call on my widowed mother in Calgary only for an occasional $100, and I was not on welfare or UI, so I had to find work – any work - as fast as possible, and stay in cheap accommodation. I found ill-paid but steady work as a day labourer for the rest of the year, and wound up staying in the same building for more than two, even when my fortunes improved. It had an outside staircase, which for some months led me to a tiny room facing out on the street with two glassed-in double doors, admitting all weather; the rent was $5 a week, and I was still weeks behind at first.
   My improving fortunes by early 1963 made it possible for me to move inside and down a short hallway to what was my first real Montreal apartment, costing $12 a week. It was not self-contained; it came off a central and communal kitchen, with a shared bathtub and toilet in the hall. The entrance door led into a commodious front room, already cheaply furnished with a couch, a table, some chairs, and a sink and working fridge. There was a separate small bedroom and small bed at the rear, as well as a rear door to a staircase down to the alley, I shared the hall bath and toilet, and the circular central kitchen, with a noisy, French Canadian family, fond of alcohol and frequent fights, but good-humoured most of the time. There were two grandparents, a young couple, a small boy, a budgie and a hamster. The hamster frequently escaped lackadaisical confinement, and dropped little black turds in the hallway. The family and I exchanged friendly salutations, but I never got to know them, even though I sometimes had to navigate through the middle of one of their occasional screaming matches. The two individuals I did get to know well were the building manager, a wise and kind man named Eric Powell, a former skilled printer brought down by alcoholism, and the landlord, Harry Snarch.
   Harry, a balding man of about sixty, radiated gloom. He was condemned to almost daily adventures by his unruly, mostly unemployed, and largely alcoholic tenants. He was heavily dependent on many skillful interventions by Eric, a model of calm stoicism. I witnessed a long series of theatrical events, many caused by a sort of commune of a dozen drunken New Brunswickers in three of the buildings, who offered constant new excitements. Harry was what would be called a slum landlord, but a good one in his way. He was on Jeanne Mance almost every day, working out of an ancient station wagon stuffed with ladders, paint cans, and tools, the chronically worried and bumbling lord of his little fief. He often found strange new ways to augment his rents. The most memorable example was his purchase for a trivial sum of a vast quantity of cheap tinned sardines and creamed corn, which he sold to tenants at irresistibly low prices; sometimes the day's entire nourishment, they caused explosive and vile flatulence. I have never since eaten either.
   The New Brunswick drunks often delivered the unexpected. In the building across the street, the only telephone was a pay phone in the hall. One day, it was found ripped from the wall and destroyed, victim of a drunken fury. But they could be useful. When the plumbing completely corroded under one building, it had led to a huge pileup of stinking toilet excrement. Eric refused to come near it, but with a bribe of alcohol and beer, got three of the Maritimers to pitch right in with shovels and buckets, eventually tossing ancient turds at each other as they worked.
   Harry once attempted to order Eric to expel a rather desperate young woman, pregnant and broke and three months behind on her rent.
   Eric refused: “You'll have to do that yourself.”
   Sulking and muttering, Harry marched up the stairs and disappeared for a few moments, looking even sulkier when he came down.
   “Well?” Eric said. “Uh...aw...I lent her ten bucks, “ Harry sighed, and headed off to the station wagon.
   “I knew he'd do that,” Eric told me. I still recall them both affectionately, as my introduction to 1960s Montreal.
Read the entire My First Montreal Apartment series

• Snarchland: Neil Cameron's My First Montreal Apartment
• My First Montreal Apartment: John Allore
• Mike Boone: My first Montreal apartment
• My first Montreal apartment: Jack Ruttan
• Vava Vol - My first Montreal apartment
• My first Montreal apartment: Kate McDonnell
• My first Montreal apartment: John Hood
• My first Montreal apartment: Stephen Lack
• My first Montreal apartment: Taras Grescoe
• My first Montreal apartment: Dennis Trudeau
• My first Montreal apartment: Colin Robertson
• My first apartment - Daniel Richler