Читать книгу Let It Snow. Keeping Canada's Winter Sports Alive онлайн

13 страница из 53

If there is such a thing as a series of small straws that eventually broke the back of national unity, Carrier’s fictional character had more than his load, though on a deeper level the story speaks to the profound shared experience of all Canadians, regardless of whether their first language is French of English. Saturday nights in winter were the purest demonstrations of this realm.

If you lived in English Canada, it was a magical time for listening to Foster Hewitt’s radio call of the Leafs game. He inspired young and old to imagine their own lives as great stars or at the very least as persons who might one day be lucky enough to spend just one evening in the hallowed Maple Leaf Gardens. It was the closest thing to a public shrine in Canada, that is unless you lived in Quebec, where the Montreal Forum played a similarly haunting role.

Young women might vicariously share in these moments, but for them the exploits of Barbara Ann Scott, women’s figure-skating gold medalist in the 1948 Winter Olympics, inspired their own twirls and spins on ice, even as they asked Santa Claus to please leave under their family tree a doll fashioned in the likeness of the great skater who had won her first national junior title as an eleven-year-old.