Passages: Welcome Home to Canada (14 page)

Since then I think I’ve come to understand that immigration is not just about changing countries. You can cross four thousand miles of ocean from England to Canada and not feel like an immigrant; or you can move five hours down the road from one piece of Canada to another and make yourself strangely at home in a foreign culture. Then there’s the country of the mind, where the frontiers are elusive, forever shifting.

My early childhood memories amount to a handful of sensory images. I grew up in a seaside town called Whitley Bay, near Newcastle upon Tyne. We lived on Queen’s Road, which ended in a field where horses licked sugar cubes out of my hand, and beyond that were out-of-bounds brambles and railway tracks.
I remember making mud balls by a coal fire in winter. Summer weekends on a cold beach, knees turning blue in the icy shriek of the North Sea. Eating potato crisps from a bag that came with its own little pack of salt that got mixed up with the sand on my fingers. When the tide was out, we’d walk to the lighthouse. Out and back. That smooth white tower was Whitley Bay’s postcard landmark.

On the other side of town was the Spanish City, a carnival midway greased with danger and dark skin. It was the most foreign place imaginable. I never went there but always heard it talked about as a forbidden zone, a cartoon example of what it meant to be “common.” Years later, in Canada, whenever the family would drive along a country road and ride over those sudden hills that make you feel briefly airborne, we’d shout “Spanish City bumps!” in a happy chorus. It was a reference to the roller coaster in that Whitley Bay fairground, but the phrase had become so familiar to me that I’d forgotten its origin, assuming it was just an English idiom for a hilly road.

When I left England at the age of five I was too young to know what a country was, never mind a “Canada.” I was under the impression that we were taking a ship to see a cannon. Ship, cannon—there was a certain logic to it. And I still remember the
disappointment of walking down vast white gangway corridors into an indoor ship that didn’t look like a ship, and then being told, amid much laughter, that there would be no cannon, only this place called Canada. It was October 1954, and we were sailing on the
Empress of France
—my mother, my ten-year-old brother and myself. My father had gone ahead by plane to buy a house.

It was a rough crossing. In the mid-Atlantic we were whiplashed by the tail end of Hurricane Hazel, a monster storm that was a step ahead of us, also en route to Toronto but travelling at a faster clip. We spent most of the passage lying seasick below decks, being served Canada Dry ginger ale by a kindly cabin steward. For my mother the whole experience was terrifying. She’d never been on a ship or a plane, and hadn’t ventured farther from home than the Devon coast. Now she was travelling alone, sailing into an uncertain future with two small children. On the ship, we met the Chilcotts, a couple immigrating to Toronto because of another branch-office job at an English insurance company. It’s as if the insurance men were the last missionaries, out to civilize a precarious future. The Chilcotts became our good friends. In our new home, where we had no relatives, we’d spend every Christmas with them, keeping alive
the English tradition of turkey with stuffing balls, bread sauce and sherry trifle.

Although the passage was rough, we weren’t exactly boat people. We spent out first three weeks at the Royal York Hotel, experiencing a comfy form of culture shock. After reaching Toronto, we couldn’t get to our new house because Hurricane Hazel had washed out the bridges to the west end. (Hazel was the worst natural disaster in Canadian history. Eighty-one people were killed in Toronto, thirty-two of them when a row of fourteen houses slid into the Humber River.)

In the New World everything looked huge—the streets, the cars, the buildings, the steaks. My brother and I spent our days tearing up and down the mammoth corridors of the Royal York, which was the biggest building we’d ever seen, the centrepiece of a skyline that was immeasurably tall and modern. Boys love bigness, and Canada was larger than life.

We moved to a bungalow on the suburban frontier, an Etobicoke subdivision still scarred and muddy from the storm. The wildness of the country was just a short walk away, across the field and through the woods to the creek and Snapping Turtle Pond. My father spent weekends sinking fence posts around the treeless yard, and panelling the rec room. He finished
just in time to sell the house and buy a better one, where he panelled another rec room. My brother and I hung plastic models of American warplanes on the fresh walls, and played ping-pong to pancake stacks of 45s. Ray Charles, Del Shannon, Duane Eddy, Chuck Berry. The novelties of growing up—music, TV and toys—were American, but the rest of Canada was as British as it was Canadian. So we fit right in. It was the early sixties. There was no flag, no Margaret Atwood, no Gordon Lightfoot or Joni Mitchell. Aside from the black-and-white beauty of
Hockey Night in Canada
, a ritual our whole family happily embraced, Canadian identity was barely an idea. But everywhere you looked, there were signs of the Motherland, from ubiquitous reminders of the Queen to the home-country twang of Ray Sonin hosting
Calling All Britons
on CFRB radio.

We were not rich. My father worked so hard to create a comfortable life for us that he didn’t live long enough to fully reap the benefits. His own father had died when he was a boy, so he gave up a dream of becoming an engineer and went to work to support his mother. He always had a healthy respect for money. He would keep coins stacked in perfect little towers on his dresser. A man of routine. He once told me, with a grin of immense satisfaction,
that he always put his socks on first when he got dressed in the morning. Although he never offered an explanation, it always struck me as a precaution against something. As an insurance man, Father believed in guarding against calamity.

My parents arrived in Canada with some notions of class that were not about money. They couldn’t get used to the idea of seeing my older brother and me heading off to school in jeans. They worried about us falling in with the wrong crowd, the kind of kids their own parents would have called “common.” So they scrimped and saved to send us both to Upper Canada College, an uncommonly private school, where I would spend ten years. Upper Canada was an ersatz England, with masters instead of teachers, forms instead of grades. The cane, not the strap, was the scourge of choice. We played cricket in the spring. And there were more than a few English accents among the faculty.

My most formative teacher was a Brit who got me addicted to reading books. He fed me true stories of the Second World War, and by the time I was twelve, I’d read them all: fighter ace Douglas Bader gunning down Germans in the Battle of Britain after losing both his legs, the Dambusters sneaking bombs down rivers, wounded men on morphine skiing to freedom
in Scandinavia, frozen sailors manning convoys to Murmansk, the silent dread of the U-boat wolf packs, the bomber crews haunted by the sweet odour of human flesh burning in the incendiary attacks on Hamburg and Dresden, and all those nifty British aircraft—Spitfires, Hurricanes, Lancasters, Mosquitoes. In the late fifties the war was still in the relatively recent past, and its literature had blossomed. It was, I think, the reason I became a writer. I wanted to emulate what I’d read, and even attempted a bogus short story of escaping from a prison camp and waiting to feel the thud of bullets in my back.

Because I didn’t board at Upper Canada, I was spared the habitual canings and pedophile intrigues that were the price of living on the grounds. But unlike other “day boys,” many of whom lived nearby in opulent Forest Hill, I commuted ten miles each day from Etobicoke, and that fostered a split personality of sorts. My life contained two distinct worlds: a private school of ties and blazers and Anglican hymns, and a suburb of Popsicles, bikes and creeks. Torn between school and suburb, I felt like an imposter in both, never rich or cool enough to fit into cliquish Upper Canada, and a stranger to the ordinary life of suburban kids who wore jeans and knew girls. Between these two worlds was my
father’s car radio, tuned to early rock’n’roll exactly half the time (he was scrupulously fair). This was the sound of America, pre-Beatles, and for my brother and me it was the first thing that felt truly ours. Elvis separated us from our parents, and from England, unequivocally. My mother was no square—she always liked “a good beat” and loved to dance—but she couldn’t stand the grease or the sneer. Elvis
was
the Spanish City.

Meanwhile, another kind of rift had opened in my psyche. Soon after arriving in Canada, I remember playing with some neighbourhood kids in the dirt of a cinder-block foundation and being teased about my English accent. From then on I worked to eliminate it. At home, however, I maintained my cover. The crucial test came around words like “pyjama” and “banana,” with vowels that couldn’t be fudged. It’s not that my parents enforced the accent; they were always tolerant and eager to adapt. But at the time, speaking “Canadian” felt oddly sinful. Our family was never religious. God, like sex, was a subject not raised in polite company. The only thing resembling religion was our Englishness, an unspoken creed that prized a modest sense of superiority. It was good to have money, but not to flaunt it. Politeness was proof of good breeding. And excess of any kind was suspicious;
sweets must not be too sweet or meat too well done, and large California strawberries were a reminder that fruit and vegetables had more taste “back home.”

Food, of course, is central to any culture, and my mother’s cooking provided the most tangible link to the place that she and my father still called “home” two decades after emigrating. English cooking gets a bad rap for being tasteless and overcooked, but I have only good memories of my mother’s cuisine: steak-and-kidney pie with a hard-boiled egg, Atlantic-white flakes of milk-poached fin-and-haddie, roast-beef gravy poured into crispy towers of Yorkshire pudding. This was comfort food, and
pudding
was the operative word. Mother’s desserts shaped my sybaritic nature from an early age. I was forever spoiled by her un-American apple pie, sugared just past the edge of tartness. And so many puddings—steamed pudding in rivers of warm custard, bread pudding milk-sweet and soft, rice pudding with its tawny skin, the meringue loft of Queen’s pudding layered with raspberry jam, the pillowy depths of blancmange, the infamous Christmas trifle booby-trapped with liquor—not to mention the family-heirloom fruitcake, which was called Georgian Margaret for reasons no one can recall.

For all its comforts, however, in cultural terms an English upbringing was a restricted diet. Other races
were, at best, a curiosity. And Upper Canada College was then almost exclusively
WASP
, male and affluent. Our principal reminded us at every opportunity that we were being groomed to be “leaders.” What gave us this privilege was never explained. But one of the things about living among the sons of the ruling class is that you become immune to its charms. The really rich kids were often the most moronic. So I developed a casual contempt for money. By working as journalist, and for several years as a musician, I managed to avoid the wealth I had been trained to expect with
noblesse oblige
. And to this day, although I’ve developed a desire for money, I remain unimpressed by it.

Attending Upper Canada College was like being the citizen of a small, privileged principality, a city state utterly aloof from the world outside the grounds. And the culture shock of leaving UCC was profound. At the University of Toronto, I enrolled at University College, where the majority of students were Jewish. At the time I’m not sure I knew what it meant to be Jewish, because the more noticeable difference in my environment was that, after ten years, I was finally among female students
—girls
sitting right next to me. I couldn’t believe it. Everyone else seemed to take it for granted.

It was the late sixties. I would discover Jews, sex, drugs, rock’n’roll and communism. All at once: listening to Jim Morrison sing “Break on Through to the Other Side” while I made out on the grass of Varsity Stadium, on grass, with Barbara, a Jew who found it amusing that I wasn’t Jewish—Barbara who selected me, moved in with me, taught me the beauty of constant fucking, and left me six months later after I went home for Christmas without her. She’d said she didn’t mind not coming with me and, like an idiot, I’d believed her.

Christmas was always sacred. But otherwise I lost track of England. In the righteous carnival of radical politics, I turned against my upbringing, my class background and—regrettably—my family. Our generation didn’t need a heritage; we were inventing our own. Bastard children of Marx and Freud, we imagined a world ungoverned by family or state, and found a place in the sun of psychedelic drugs, believing in nothing so much as the inarguable beauty of our youth.

Still, one had to work. And for me, like my father, an accident of employment set my destiny. In 1971, after I’d apprenticed as a summer reporter at the Toronto
Telegram
, the newspaper folded. The city editor took me and a few of his young proteges to the
Gazette
in Montreal. I thought I was just getting a job, but in moving to Quebec, I became an immigrant once again, rubbing up against a culture that felt thrillingly foreign yet warm and welcoming. In Toronto, I had never once felt foreign; I’d melted into English Canada like a snowflake hitting warm pavement. But in Montreal, the difference was tangible. Embedded in the city’s geography, the two solitudes gave explicit form to my own sense of divided identity, which until then had felt internal, more of a dissociated mental state than a cultural condition. In Montreal there was clear demarcation between English and French, or as I saw it at the time, between outside and inside. Here was an opportunity to become truly
déraciné
. Like those English madmen searching out the heat of the noonday sun, I would fling myself into the world until I was as far from home as possible. But in Quebec, I would also feel my first real affection for a national culture, the first kiss of collectivity. I would adopt Quebec as a surrogate mother country, in the secret belief that Quebec had adopted me.