Trinity College School - Record Yearbook (Port Hope, Ontario Canada)

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TRINITY COLLEGE SCHOOL RECORD 141 Charles John Huffom Dickens 11812-18705 Charles Dickens was born at Landport, England, in 1812. He was the second of eight children. His father was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office. When he was four years old his family moved first to Chatham and then to London. He did not have much education and he taught himself by reading old novels. After a short time his father managed to get himself into serious debt. To help pay this debt Charles' mother set up school, which ended as a complete failure. His father went off to Marshalsea Debtors' Prison. In later life Charles wrote a book, Little Dorrit , which by its description of the horrors of prison life is partly responsible for the abolition of the debtors' law. While his father was in prison, Charles lived in misery in Camden Town and worked in a blackening factory by the Thames for six shillings a week. His book t'David Copperfield is a description of his life in the slums of London. After a period of three months his father ran into a fortunate legacy that paid his debts nicely. Charles now returned to school for two years. At fifteen he became a junior clerk in a lawyer's office where he learned the faults of the old English laws. In one and a half year's time Charles was reporting in the law courts but finding this work dull, he made the choice of being a newspaper reporter rather than an actor. Soon he was reporting in the House of Commons and at political meetings all over England. He began writing for literary papers. The Monthly Magazine pub- lished his first humorous sketch in 1833. He also wrote other sketches under the name of Boz for the Evening Chronicle and others. He was asked to write a story to go along with a set of drawings by Robert Sey- mour. The result was the Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club which appeared serially in 1836-1837. In the following year he became editor of a monthly magazine in which Oliver Twist was the main fea- ture. In 1836 Charles married Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of the editor of the Evening Chronicle. The marriage was an unhappy one and the pair separated. Twenty-two years later at the peak of his career he began giving public readings of his works but the strain created by these was so great that it probably caused his death. He died suddenly at the age of 58 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Dickens was apt to be moved by sudden impulse or swayed by emo- tiong he was easily made happy or easily put in a bad humourg hewas af- fectionate and quick to resent criticism. He liked to attack oppression wherever he found it. By all people Dickens is considered to be one of the greatest English writers. -J. Dreyer, IIA

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140 TRINITY COLLEGE SCHOOL RECORD Here they come again. those scavengers, can't you see them? Pilot can't you see them? There was the chatter of machine guns, the sickening sound of bullets ripping fabric and metal and then silence. The purr of the engine died away and the battle for life began. llarry was mortally wounded, he was belching ugly black smoke and was spinning out of control. Harry put everything he had into getting out of the spin but the damages were too great. The green and yellow patches of fields rushed up to meet him. He felt the wind whistling through his intakes for the last time. There was an exploson which rocked the countrysideg Harry had died. It was said that A3-AL-1 was shot down in combat August 5th, 1941, after sending three Germans to their graves. Harry died like a Spitfire. -I. McGregor, IIA Ernest Hemingway H898-19611 Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, a suburb near Chicago, Illi- nois, in 1898. His father, a doctor, taught him how to hunt and fish at their country place in Northern Michigan. This American novelist is more closely associated with Northern Michigan than with his birthplace. He used his boyhood in Michigan as a background for some of his well-known short stories. He left home when he graduated from high school and went to work as a reporter on the Kansas City Star. He tried to enlist in the First World War and was rejected because of an old eye injury. He enlisted as an ambulance driver on the Italian Front and in 1918 was badly wounded on the Piave. Slowly recovering, he returned to the U.S. and worked for a few years as a reporter and for a time with the Toronto Star. He finally settled in Paris where he began to write in earnest. He submitted his work for criticism to Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, the latter an able adviser to many writers. He developed the simple unemotional and naive style that brought him renown. His first two books did not sell well. It was his successful The Sun Also Rises that made his name known. It was written in 1926. This Was followed by A Farewell to Arms in 1929. To Have and Have Not', and For Whom The Bell Tolls represented Hemingway's first Search for wider social meanings, the former written in 1937 and the latter in 1940. Hemingway did not write another novel until 1950 when he wrote Across The River and Into The Trees . which was a complete failure, in contrast with The Old Man and The Sea , a novel about a battle with unconquerable natural forces, which won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 apd4was important in winning for him the Nobel Prize for Literature in .15 . Besides writing novels he wrote a plav, 'tThe Fifth Column , and Took? on bull fighting and big game hunting, both pastimes which he UVCI . In the 1930's Hemingway lived in Key West, Florida, and later moved to cuba. During the Second World War he served as a war correspondent in Spain. Vhina and Europe. Ernest Hemingway married four times. He left 3 sons when he died of a self-inflicted gun wound. The world lost a great novelist and .short story writer when he died. -T. W. Barnett, IIA

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l-12 TRINITY COLLEGE SCHOOL RECORD The Bird Feeding Station Where had the grain been going? Who had been stealing it? For the last three days the citizens of Kimbirdy, Birdish Columbia, had had no- thing to eat. To-day they had a conference to decide what to do. Robert Robin suggested that maybe the cat had taken it, but Charlie Chickadee turned that down because the Pekinese dog, Alexander the Small, controlled the neighbourhood cats. The discussion kept up until the list of suspects was narrowed down to two people: Badman Blue Jay and Criminal Crow. Sergeant Sparrow immediately wired the best detectives he knew: Sherlock Swallow and Lloyd Birdgess, a diver from a nearby town in Albirda. That day the birds that were let off work for the conference hid around the feeding station. Lloyd Birdgess dove to the depths of the bird bath while Sherlock Swallow looked for clues from the previous day. At eleven o'clock sharp the two suspected birds arrived, wheeled over head, and, sensing no danger, dived for the food. As soon as they hit the ground the whole bird police force jumped on them. They are to be locked up until the case comes up in court. This evening there is to be a feast to celebrate the returning of the grain. -David Moffatt, IA The Boomerang The boomerang is one of the oldest and most peculiar weapons ever used by man. The alleged inventors of the boomerang are the Australian Aborigines, but old boomerangs have been dug up in Egypt, India and even America. The word boomerang doesn't mean anything special but is taken from the name of a tribe in New South Wales. Boomerangs are divided into two classes - the return and the non- return or war boomerang. The return boomerang is better known but is regarded by the Aborigines as a toy rather than a weapon. The war- boomerang is heavier and straighter, being used for hunting and in war. Apart from this difference the two types are similar. Both are made of some well-seasoned wood lke elm, ash or hickory. After the wood is cut, it is put in some boiling water or over hot ashes to make it soft enough to mold into the 90 to 120 degree angle that is required. After this has been performed, one side is rounded and the arms are twisted slightly in the opposite direction so that they are 2 de- grees off the central plane. It is the pressure of the air on the rounded side and the twist that make it return and do circles in the air. The Aborigines of Australia can make the boomerang do amazing things. They can throw it so that it will go straight for 30 yards then make a circle 50 yds. in diameter and then return to its thrower. Although no accurate measurements have been made of boomerang throws, it is believed that some natives can throw the war boomerang over 400 feet. In England the distance has been measured sometimes and a man from London is alleged to have thrown it 397 feet, while he was only able to throw a cricket ball 200 feet. Although the boomerang is merely a crude weapon used by backward natives, it is a most interesting and puzzling machine. -C. G. F. Nation, IIAU