New book on The Point

   Kathy Dobson wrote a recently-penned memoir about growing up in Point St. Charles, she’s about 50 now.
  She got the idea to write the book after attending her mother’s funeral and hearing a flood of tributes to her mom Eileen, who had been a big-time activist in the area when she was a child. Eileen raised her six daughters more or less on her own as dad was in and out of the picture.
   Mom ended up chasing dad off to Hamilton Ontario around the referendum before dying about 6 years ago. She always regretted leaving Montreal.
  The funeral gave Kathy a different perspective on her mom, who never hesitated to put her to use for a political cause.
   “I had thought she was a pain in the ass. She was always fighting with school board and city hall. She was using us for her activism. She was in the whole social movement in the Point in the late 60s, with the first CLSC coming to the Point with the students from McGill and social workers,” said Dobson.
   The Point was a poor insular place where a lack of education, money and a set of strict geographical boundaries meant that many never left their neighbourhood.
   But mom decided to work with the do-gooders to improve conditions and the kids had to take part.
   “We’d invade the welfare office until the riot squad would show up. We’d go and lie like a row, forming a carpet because they had denied someone glasses for their seven-year-old or humiliated someone else. They became militant about not taking it anymore people were treating them as if poverty was a choice.”
   Eileen sought a better education for her kids and ended up sending Kathy to Westmount Park School. “They dumped us in the school and wondered why we floundered, I thought every other kid was a secret genius,” says Kathy. “The teacher would ask ‘where’s Peru?’ and the other kids could point it on a map. She’d go up and down the rows doing the times table and I thought I'm going to run out of this room when it comes to my turn.”
   By comparing herself to the Westmounters, Kathy realized for the first time that she was poor. “We thought it was normal to not have stuff to eat, or to have rats and cockroaches, not having lunch. At Westmount Park, the other kids would say ‘what’s for lunch?” or ‘why would you wear that?’”
   Kathy had similar problems at Westmount High School, getting poor marks for a few years before finally quitting altogether. She eventually returned and earned a university degree, something not common for people from the Point which ranked people not on education but on other criteria.
   “There’s a hierarchy in the Point based on gangs, it was pretty violent but most of the violence occurred in the home. I wasn’t nervous walking down the street, I knew what to expect, there were people in your own life, more often they were victims of hopelessness, powerlessness and poverty. Everyone knew the pedophile at the end of Liverpool, go down for a bag of chips and he’d try to do things. I think we’re more aware of what went on inside the homes.”
   Kathy now lives in Waterloo Ontario and her five sisters live in Hamilton but she is aiming to move back and reacquaint herself to the hometown she left.
   In retrospect Kate says that the only regret in any of it is that her mom left the neighbourhood that she had worked so hard to improve. “She ended up still poor but poor without community in Hamilton,” says Kathy.