Slum Lords: Who Needs Them?

As one can imagine, growing up poor meant living in places that were not
for the weak or tender-hearted. You had to be tough to grow up in a slum. Life was hard and you had to roll with the punches. My grandmother and I lived alone for the first 18 years of my life, in the same second-story cold water flat.

For the first 15 years we did not have a bath or a shower. We had a toilet in a little cubby hole and not even a sink for washing up afterwards. You had to leave the commode and come out into the kitchen to wash your hands.

In the evening when nobody was around, you bathed with a washcloth,
soap, and towel at the kitchen sink. Finally when I was 15 years old, a bathtub was installed. It had taken about four years of nagging for the landlord to finally put it in. Ours was connected and worked. I cannot say the same for the neighbour's tub next door. They got the bathtub, but it was never connected, and they ended up using it to store dirty clothes.

The house was cold in the wintertime. When I was really young, my
grandmother put me to bed in my snowsuit because she was afraid that I might freeze during the night. The old oil stove heated the kitchen but not much more. I remember from the age of 9 until the age of 17, that I had to walk two full blocks in the dead of winter to the oil stand where I deposited 25 cents to fill up the oil bottle. Then I dragged it back home. I can remember the cold nights just like it was yesterday, and furthermore, I can still conjure up that stinky smell of oil that would invade my nostrils and almost made me sick.

But at least we had the oil stove. The neighbours next door had a wood
stove and I would also make trips with Johnny and Jackie, the twins, to the
railroad tracks, where we picked up the old pieces of wood to take home for them to heat their home. It was dark and scary and we had to do it at night so we would not get caught stealing them.

My grandmother was a great housekeeper: she was known as Mrs. Clean
throughout the neighbourhood. My grandmother would even wash and iron
the old rags she used to clean that old oil stove. Her reputation preceded her, and people would come from all over to see her house and ask if it was true she washed and ironed these dirty, oily rags.

However, try as she might to keep our house clean, the neighbours were dirty and the block was always infested with cockroaches. Fortunately, our landlord would send the exterminator every time she complained.

My grandmother had another use for rags as well. The plaster in the walls
of our flat was crumbling. The walls were in no condition to be painted. My
grandmother had to wallpaper over them. But she could not wallpaper over
the huge holes that the crumbling plaster made in the walls. She would have to fill up the holes with old rags in order to smooth out the walls before wallpapering. Once the job was done you could not tell what condition the walls were in beneath the wallpaper. It was a truly professional job.

Yes, it was a horrible place, but it was home. Furthermore, my
grandmother had no intention of moving. You see, the only income that came in was the board money that my mom provided for me each week, which was $10 a week. The rent was $40 a month. My grandmother would take in washing and babysat just to put food on our table. As a result, my grandmother inevitably got behind in her rent.

Fortunately for us, Mr. Snarch was a kindly slum lord. He knew my
grandmother's desperate situation and he allowed her to pay whatever she
could when she could. He never demanded his money or threatened to evict her as he did with other tenants.

I knew for a fact that he did this because when I was little he used to take me on his rounds for rent collection. He liked me and felt sorry for both myself and my grandmother.

As he expressed to my grandmother on several occasions, he was never blessed with daughters. He had two sons, though. Therefore, I was like the little girl he never had. He could never understand how my mother or father could just abandon me the way they did. Even though my mother did pay my board money, he judged her as a terrible mother nonetheless.

On one occasion when he came for the rent money, he noticed that my
grandmother was particularly stressed out that evening. Upon questioning
her, he found out that I needed glasses badly. The principal had sent home a note saying I could not see the blackboard at school and this situation had to be rectified as soon as possible. My grandmother had no money, she asked my mother and my father and both of them claimed they could not afford to buy me glasses, either. She was at her wits end and didn't know what to do.

Furthermore she was upset with me. She could get a pair of glasses for me

from the Canadian Red Cross, but they were old-fashioned and I thought that the kids in school would laugh at me. I threatened that if I had to wear those ugly glasses I would not go to school. I already had to suffer the indignity of wearing second-hand clothes from the Salvation Army and being laughed at.

Getting glasses from these charities was just too much to ask of an 11 year

old. I sat there quietly as she told him all about how ungrateful I was. I sank further and further down into my chair as she spoke. Much to my surprise however, he agreed with me. He said that a beautiful young girl such as I should not have to wear those ugly glasses and be humiliated in front of her friends. At this point both my grandmother and I were almost in tears as she threw her hands up in the air and asked what could she do?

Mr. Snarch surprised us both that evening because he volunteered to buy
me a pair of glasses. My grandmother, though happy, replied that she did not have the money to pay him back for it and he answered her by saying,

"Don't worry about it, pay what you can when you can," for he knew that would be the only way she would ever accept the gift. He also knew very well that she would never be able to pay the bill. There was one condition though, and that was that we were not allowed to tell the other tenants, for obvious reasons.

What Mr. Snarch did for me that evening was a true act of love, surpassing anything that any landlord has ever done for any tenant as far as I am concerned. Now I ask you the question: Slum lords—who needs them, anyhow? I can honestly say we did!