The Old Man and The Pony

In 1953, for all intents and purposes, the old city of Toronto only stretched from the shores of Lake Ontario to the southern slopes of the Don Valley at a place called Hog’s Hollow. That was the last stop for the Young Street trolley and from that point northwards patches of urban squalor were just beginning to encroach onto the surrounding farmland.

When I was ten years old, our family moved onto a recently constructed cluster of suburbia a few miles beyond the city limits just north of Steels Avenue. Our subdivision was the first of its kind north of the city. All the houses were brand new white clapboard bungalows, “they were all made out of ticky tacky and they all looked just the same.”

The small country schools in the area needed to be expanded to accommodate all the city kids moving in and although the student population was a strange mixture of city slickers and local yokels we all seemed to get along, although my circle of were almost exclusively comprised of the farm kids. I spent most of my free time playing and helping with chores on the many functioning farms still holding on in the area.

At the time, there was a small convenience/general store located on the southeast corner of Steels Avenue and Young Street, not far from where we lived. It had been serving the farm community for years and shortly after we moved into the area the owner died and it became available for rent. My parents decided to try their hand at shop keeping and because I also spent a lot of time around the store I became even more involved with the farming community.

I recently went to the site of the old store and as I stood in the shadow of the high-rise buildings that now dominate the intersection, it was hard to visualize what it had looked like back when I was a kid. In those days there were a few businesses and houses on the east side of Young Street south of our store, but on the west side Holstein cattle still grazed in a huge pasture. Everything north of Steels, with the exception of our subdivision, was still farm country.

We only lived in the area and operated the store for a short time but I still have many vivid memories of the things I saw as my pals and and I would sit on the steps of the store sucking our purple popsicles and watching the traffic buzz by on the main artery out of the city.

One day something happened that has haunted me for years and I only recently have begun to understand what it was all about.

It was around noon on a warm summer day when two trucks pulled up on the wide shoulder beside the store. My friends and I watched as two men from the first enclosed van got out and opened the trucks back door. They disappeared inside then backed out dragging a shiny red governess cart by its shafts. It was after they had eased it on to the ground and went to the second truck that they really got our attention.

They dropped the tailgate down and revealed the prettiest piebald Shetland pony we had ever seen. The little horse stood impatiently snorting and pawing the truck bed while one of the men slipped in beside him and then backed him down the ramp. While one man held his lead shank the other retrieved a harness from the front of the truck then the two of them busied themselves debating strap lengths and hanging a brass studded leather harness on the little gelding. Shortly, a yellow cab pulled up and the taxi driver helped an ancient looking man out of the back seat. I say ancient because in those days almost all adults looked old to us but this man was definitely in the category of grandfather, if not great-grandfather.

While we watched, the truck drivers put the pony into the shafts and attached the traces. One of them stood at the pony’s head while the other loaded a series of small boxes from the trunk of the taxi, then helped the stiff old man up and through the back door of the cart.

The old man shifted the boxes around a bit then took a seat at the side of the cart and took up the reins, “Thanks, you can let him go now.” we heard him say, and then the truck drivers stood back.  The old man clucked the pony up and they trotted through the intersection and headed west on Steels Avenue.

They hadn’t traveled the length of a football field when for some reason the pony bolted. As the animal took the bit in his mouth and sprung into top gear we could see the old man attempting to stand and rein him in but there was no stopping him and before they got much further we saw the pony leap into the ditch overturning the cart and launching the old man into the bushes beside the road.

The truck drivers leaped into their vehicles and headed up the road toward the scene and we hoofed it after them. When we got close we could see the old man lying on his back and he wasn’t moving.  One of the truck drivers was attending to him while the other was attempting to cut an upside down and wildly thrashing pony out of his harness and get him out of the ditch.

My memory is not clear on what happened immediately afterwards but I do remember police cars and ambulances arriving and seeing the old man taken away on a stretcher. It was what I learned about the old man afterwards that has stayed with me all these years and has become so meaningful as I approach the age he must have been at the time.

The old man and the pony both survived the accident and after a brief stay in the hospital he took up lodgings at a farm very close to where the accident occurred. The Sheppards, a family I knew well because their youngest son was a friend of mine, took pity on the old man and offered him room and board while he convalesced. It was an especially good arrangement because they also had room in their barn for his pony.

My friends and I took it upon ourselves to make sure that the old man’s pony was well looked after while he was confined to a bed in his upstairs bedroom. We fed, watered and exercised the little animal- with the emphasis on his exercise. We took turns cantering the little pinto around the field behind the barn till we had the little fellow run ragged. If it happened that he was put back into harness it would have been very unlikely that he could have mustered up enough energy to run away again. As it turned out that wasn’t to be an issue because one day we arrived at the barn to discover that our pretty pony was gone and a dull looking skinny old bay mare about the same size was in his place. Les Ehrlick, a Toronto horse dealer who had sold him the first pony, had taken pity on the old man and found him the quietest pony in the province as a replacement. The mare wasn’t as much fun as the sparky little gelding but we kids continued to feed and water her.

After a couple of weeks when the old man was able to get around a little better, he started spending his mornings in the stable sitting on a pile of straw bales watching his new pony. We would meet him when we came to do our chores and although we tried to be friendly with him, he didn’t respond to us the way we had hoped. He seemed lost in his thoughts most of the time and almost unaware of our presence.

Although he never spoke more than a few words to us I often heard him talking to Mr. Sheppard when they were together in the barn and that’s when I heard his story. I absorbed all I heard and stored it away in the recesses of my ten-year-old brain not really understanding the significance of what he was revealing.

Mr. Marsden was born on a farm in Yorkshire, England, but as a very young man he was forced to leave his home and take a job in a factory in one of Britain’s industrial centres. He did a stint in the army during WW1 and then immigrated to Canada where he once again took up the lunch box and started working on the production line of an appliance manufacturer in Toronto. He spent thirty years at the same job day after day living alone and, for the most part, keeping to himself. During all those years of loneliness and drudgery he harbored a secret ambition. When he was a boy in Yorkshire, peddlers in pony carts used to travel around from farm to farm selling small dry goods and he was always in awe of the wonderful free way of life they led. Although he realized how impractical the idea was in this new day and age, the boy in him refused to let it go.  

After he retired he spent most of his time in his room on the third floor of a boarding house or feeding pigeons in the park. Several years of this drab existence passed until one morning he woke, shaking off the mist of a rapidly developing dementia and determined to fulfill his dream. He purchased his pony and cart and acquired a selection of small goods and arranged to have them delivered to the city limits.

I heard his story but when I was a boy, it was just a story, with no moral and no lesson to be learned.

His story ended one morning when the two of us showed up to do chores and found him sitting in his usual spot.  It was a while before we realized he was dead. We ran for Mr. Sheppard and then hung around for the rest of the morning while the police and then the undertaker’s van came.

It was a day that an old man’s impossible dream was put to rest, and two boys had their first unforgettable experience with death.