Fathers and Sons (8 page)

My father drifted over.

‘Goddamned reporters,’ growled the paterfamilias, glaring around him. ‘Where the hell are they? I told ’em, three o’clock at the pier.’

Chris’s scalp tingled as he felt the electric crackle of opportunity.

‘Excuse me…I’m a newspaperman. Freelance. I write, and I take photos. Can I be of help?’

The other man looked the scarecrow up and down, and then grinned. ‘You sure can, limey. My company’s just taken over a coupla big employers in Sault Ste Marie and Tillsonburg. Saved a lot of jobs. Big story. Local papers want pictures of the saviour of Ontario and his family, but it looks like their reporters can’t follow directions worth a damn.’

He fished in his pocket and pulled out a list of newspaper titles.

‘Here they are–all syndicated. Just send your shots and words to them. Think you can do it? We gotta be outta here in five minutes.’

Dad grabbed his pictures, dashed down some quotes, and headed for the darkroom of a sympathetic friend, a more successful freelance photographer who shared his tenement block, allowed him to borrow.

He was back in business.

It was tales like this that led me into journalism. I found my father’s accounts of his days in penury in Toronto rather glamorous. I was excited by the casino-like game of chance and luck involved in breaking into the newspaper business, and admired my father’s stubborn refusal to accept persistent rejection.

Later, I learned that setbacks like his are common among journalists. Everyone has a tale to tell. One of my first editors was, as a young reporter, desperate to work on America’s west coast. In 1963 he wangled an interview for a job on the
Los Angeles Times
and arrived at its headquarters on a late autumn day with a well-rehearsed pitch.

He turned up on time outside the editor’s office, but something was wrong. Sobbing could be heard from up and down the corridor; the great man’s secretary’s cheeks ran with mascara.

‘I’m sorry,’ she sniffled, ‘but our president’s just been shot.’

He cursed himself for skipping his research on the corporate structure of the
LA Times
and made sympathetic noises. The editor materialised and called him in.

‘Hi, Bob. Look, I’m sorry, but this meeting’s gonna have to wait. Our president’s just been shot dead.’

My future boss decided to play it straight. ‘Yes, I heard…I’m so sorry…er…what was his name?’

Three hours later he was on a plane home, probably the only British journalist to leave America on the day everyone else was swarming in. To cover the assassination of President Kennedy.

My dad loved that story. Meanwhile, back in 1950 Toronto,
he worked his beach break for all it was worth. There was a central pool for syndicated copy but he bypassed that, calling each paper in turn and insisting on speaking with the editor. He offered to write subtly different stories for each title so it looked like they’d had a staff man on the job, and sent a series of alternative photos to the picture desks too, so they could claim exclusives.

He was by-lined in some editions and by the end of the day had landed a contract as a reporter/photographer for the
Woodstock Sentinel Review
, Tillsonburg bureau. Tillsonburg was a medium-sized tobacco town ninety miles southwest of Toronto and about twelve miles from the shores of Lake Erie.

My father’s break would lead to an encounter with a red-headed, eighteen-year-old actress.

My mother.

The
Woodstock Sentinel Review
was an even smaller outfit than the
Whitchurch Herald
. But at least Chris was a big fish in a small pond. Well, a middling fish in a minuscule pond. He was a one-man band, reporting on all the news and sport fit to cover. The pay wasn’t great, but enough for him to run a car, rent a decent apartment and start buying his packs of Winchesters again.

Compared to life in grey, pinched, exhausted, rationed-to-the-hilt, bankrupted post-war England, Canada was a land flowing with milk and honey. This part of Ontario rubbed up close and cosy against its border with America. Nearby
Windsor looked across narrow straits to giant Detroit; US prosperity spilled into its neighbour’s garden like water from an overflowing lake.

Sometimes Chris’s news beat took him to bigger towns nearby–London, Hamilton and Detroit’s Canadian twin, Windsor. He couldn’t get used to the sights that surrounded him. Everything was off the scale. Huge, shiny, gas-guzzling American cars (not that their thirstiness mattered–petrol was plentiful at just a few cents a gallon). Soda parlours offering every flavour of ice cream human imagination could devise. Drive-in movie theatres with little private speakers you hooked over your car’s windows. Ice-hockey rinks, brilliantly lit for violent night-time clashes between armour-clad warriors who smashed into each other, the baying crowd not satisfied until bright-red blood was sprayed across the slashed and scarred ice. Extravagantly floodlit baseball games with pitchers and batters worshipped like gods by their roaring fans.

There were chromed and mirrored bars, their walls lined with bottles of spirits bearing names he’d never even heard of. Hamburger joints, serving enormous patties of prime beef that were worth a month’s meat ration back home. Customers usually managed to eat about half of them. The rest was simply thrown away. Thrown away!

And television. Everyone had a television, the programmes impossibly superior to the modest transmissions Chris had occasionally glimpsed on the flickering sets still rare in England. Proper shows that everyone watched and talked and laughed about the next day. Many were piped in direct from
the States.
The Ed Sullivan Show
, live from New York–urbane, witty, modern.
The Sid Caesar Show
–side-splittingly funny. Apparently teams of writers worked on these programmes, roomfuls of men slaving to produce comedy jewels. Then there were the news shows; not formal, tight-sphinctered bulletins like the BBC’s clipped announcements, but rollicking, rolling extravaganzas of news and unabashed comment, stuffed with on-the-spot footage and hosted by charismatic men who were stars and household names in their own right. And all of it peppered with brash commercials, sponsors’ messages and cinema-style trailers for forthcoming programmes.

It was dazzling; amazing. Chris felt he had travelled through space and time and had landed in a futuristic nirvana.

Then there was the weather. Shawbury’s extremes seemed like mild fluctuations compared with what happened here. Summer was insufferably hot and humid; as humid as Florida, some said, with more mosquitoes. It was because of the moisture from the Great Lakes virtually surrounding the huge inland peninsular, the same watery expanses that in winter produced unimaginable quantities of snow. Lake snow, they called it. One could draw the bedroom curtains on a dry, clear, frosty night and open them next morning to look out on a different planet. Not the few inches of fluffily decorous white Chris remembered from home, but a vast shape-shifting shroud, feet thick. Familiar neighbourhood landmarks entirely vanished; road signs, hedges, walls and parked cars buried beneath the earth’s shining new crust.

Tillsonburg and its surrounding tobacco farms may have been a small news beat but it wasn’t quiet. Whatever went on
there was my father’s job to cover. He soon became fluent in the mysteries of ice hockey, baseball, basketball, and Little League or Pee-Wee. Locals liked the tall Englishman with his funny accent and he started making friends. Photographs from this time show him still at his underfed skinniest, but relaxed and smiling. His trademark spectacles gave him something of a Clark Kent appearance. He looked quite different without them. In later life, people used to say that when he removed his glasses he was a ringer for the actor Robert Wagner. He would pretend to be surprised, but secretly he was flattered by the comparison. After all, Wagner was partnered with the gorgeous Stephanie Powers in the global TV hit
Hart to Hart
.

One of Dad’s new friends was a fellow newspaperman called Bill. He was the editor of the
Tillsonburg News
, a guy on the up-and-up. Bill drove a big red Pontiac and reportedly had a stunning girlfriend. One day he phoned Chris to beg a favour.

‘Chris, I’m on a story in Toronto tonight. I promised I’d walk my girl home from the theatre–she’s starring in that new play at the Town Hall. Would you be her knight in shining armour for me?’

‘Of course. What’s she called?’

‘Mary Claire. Mary Claire McEwan. I’ll tell her to look out for the beanpole in the foyer. Be there around ten. Thanks, pal.’

‘Wait. How will I know her?’

A laugh at the other end. ‘You’ll know her.’

Dad was slightly delayed by a story that evening and arrived at the theatre a few minutes after ten. Most of the
audience and cast had already left but as he ran up the steps to the foyer the doors opened and a petite, red-headed girl hurried out. Chris thought she looked a knockout and rather French in her smart belted raincoat.

‘Mary Claire?’

‘Yes. If you’re Chris, you’re late.’

‘I know, I’m sorry…I got stuck on a story.’

‘Hmm. You sound like Bill.’

‘Er…yes…well, I’m here now. Shall we go?’

‘What do you think I was just doing?’

My father worked hard to make up lost ground as they walked to her parents’ house. After a few minutes he managed to make her laugh, and flattered her by asking about the play. But suddenly she interrupted him with: ‘We’re here.’

They were standing in front of a frame house that faced the town cinema. Two flights of wooden steps led to a veranda and front door. Through a window he could see a woman moving about. That must be Mrs McEwan, Chris thought.

He couldn’t hide his disappointment that they had arrived. ‘So soon? But I was hoping…’

‘What, that I have to walk halfway across town every night? Sorry, Englishman, this is the end of the line.’

He played for time. ‘Look, about the play. I’d like to come and see it. I could write a review for the paper, and use a picture of you. How would that be?’

‘That would be…very nice. Thank you. Bill’s been promising to do the same thing since we opened.’

‘Then I’ll see you tomorrow. Goodnight.’

‘Night.’

My father slowly retraced his steps, thinking about how he would describe this girl in his article. If he’d known how she was describing him to her mother at that very moment, he probably would have passed out with shock.

‘Play go well, dear? Want some coffee? There’s some still on, I think.’

‘Yes, it went fine. Thanks, I’ll take a cup.’

‘Bill walk you home again?’

‘No, he’s out of town. One of his friends did. An Englishman.’

‘Oh? What’s he like?’

Mary Claire sipped her coffee.

‘I think we’re going to be married.’

She brought him home for dinner a week after they met. This first meal with her family, such a timeless, prosaic ritual on the surface, was in fact one of the great turning points of my father’s life. It would have an immeasurable impact on him and his attitude to fatherhood, and a profound effect on my own childhood.

I owe a lot to the clan McEwan. But they couldn’t lay all of Christopher’s ghosts. Some bad spirits have a tendency to linger.

C
hris had been so busy making his way in the world that for nearly four years he had managed to push Denstone and his complete failure to form a demonstrative, loving relationship with his father to the bottom of his thoughts.

But nothing is forever buried. He was still emotionally scarred. Deep down he secretly thought there must be something fundamentally wrong with him. If not, why had his parents sent him away? He must be intrinsically unlovable, he decided. That was why his attempts to forge a bond with Geoffrey had never got anywhere. If his own father couldn’t bring himself to show the slightest affection towards him, well…he, Chris, couldn’t be worth very much, could he? The bleak logic seemed inescapable.

Four years chasing other people’s stories had deferred the reckoning and bought him some time; formed an anaesthetised buffer zone between childhood and manhood. But
now his suppressed insecurities began rising to the surface. Although this whirlwind romance with Mary Claire had shaken his heart–he was completely in love with her–how could she possibly love him in return? It could only be a matter of time before she caught on to the fact he was unlovable.

Gradually my mother began to sense a deep well of self-doubt concealed behind her fiancé’s outwardly confident manner. She perceived that his Englishness provided him with a screen to hide behind. Englishmen were famous for their emotional reticence, she knew, so at first it wasn’t surprising to her that when she asked him about his childhood and parents he was not exactly evasive, but reserved and vague.

Oh, he was open enough about the factual elements of his past. She knew his parents’ names, where they lived, where Chris had gone to school and so on.

But one evening, after the two of them had said their goodnights, she reflected on the conversation they’d had over dinner, and suddenly grasped what was missing from it.

He never spoke about his feelings. Not regarding his boyhood, anyway. Not about the past at all, in fact. With a slight shock she realised she had no idea if he had been a happy child or not, or what he thought of his parents. He simply didn’t say. More to the point, he avoided saying. What could it mean?

As the months went by, the studied casualness he always displayed over these matters began to unsettle her. She confided in her mother Barbara.

‘It’s not that I believe he’s hiding something horrible,
Mother. I don’t think he has some awful dark secret or anything like that. But I can tell he’s unsure and unhappy about something, and I’m more and more certain it’s somehow to do with his family in England. I want to help him but I don’t know what to say or do.’

Barbara regarded her eldest daughter calmly. ‘You must get him completely on his own, choose your moment, and ask him outright. You’ll get your answer, dear–either by what he says, or what he doesn’t say.’

The following weekend Chris, on Mary Claire’s suggestion, hired a small motor launch and the two of them went out for the day on Lake Erie. It was now humid, sultry summer but they were cooled by the breeze puffing across the water. They ate their lunch as the little boat rocked in the slight swell of the great inland sea, and after a long companionable silence, Mary Claire decided the moment had come.

‘Darling…what is it you won’t tell me about your childhood, your life back at Shawbury?’

Years later my father would describe the question as like a door swinging open before him; a doorway he could shun or pass through. The choice was his.

He turned to look towards the distant shoreline, and then back at the eyes of the young woman looking solemnly into his own. The moment held itself in perfect balance a while longer and then gently dipped under his decision.

‘Well…this will probably sound…I don’t know. I’ve never spoken to a soul about it, but…’

For the first time in his life, hesitatingly, Chris began to describe the doubts and fears and disappointments that had
haunted him for as long as he could remember. As his fiancée listened in silence, the lake murmured its accompaniment.

A dark tide that had begun to run nearly half a century earlier, flooding through two lives, father’s and son’s, was at last about to turn.

Chris’s childhood was, to Mary Claire, a bewildering contrast to her own happy, freewheeling Canadian upbringing. She could see at once that her future father-in-law had been savagely assaulted by fate, but her concern now was to free his son from what seemed to her like something close to a curse. She realised the young man she had agreed to marry had had no working model, no template, on which to base their future family life together.

So the McEwans unselfconsciously presented him with their own example. It was to be his salvation. And, ultimately, up to a point, mine.

Mary Claire’s kid brother Bailey was barely a fortnight old when Chris walked into my mother’s family home at 174 Broadway for the first time. Her younger sister Barbara-Ann was fifteen. Mary Claire was eighteen, and the oldest child, Malcolm, twenty-two. Their mother, Barbara, was in her early forties and father Hector had just turned fifty. It was a vibrant family that cheerfully spanned five decades; a typical and
triumphant product of the modern North American way–confident, affluent (Hector owned a garage and Barbara ran a hair salon), forward-looking and relaxed.

Chris had never been in a house like it. The McEwan home seemed to glow with emotional warmth. Perhaps that was because women were a strong presence–a mother and two daughters outnumbered and outgunned the men and Chris marvelled at the loving, playful atmosphere that surged around him whenever he visited his fiancée. He didn’t realise it then, but his emotional DNA was being subtly re-engineered by the McEwans’ family chemistry. Their immediate unfeigned fondness for him astounded him. These were people who spontaneously kissed and hugged each other, and the young Englishman found himself the new object of their warm familiarity.

My father told me he experienced more demonstrative affection in one week in Tillsonburg than he had known in his entire life in Shawbury. At first he was startled and confused by the experience; quickly he came to love it. And them.

My father was most fascinated by Hector’s behaviour. On weekend visits to the McEwan home, Dad would sit pretending to read a newspaper while covertly observing his future father-in-law’s playful exchanges with his children as they came and went. Malcolm, though now in his early twenties, was still hugged, kissed or playfully wrestled with. Chris was astounded. Watching such overt demonstrations of affection was almost like learning a new language.

The girls were kissed and teased too, and Bailey was everyone’s darling, swept through the house in the interchangeable
arms of his siblings or parents. If the baby had been an accidental and tardy addition to the family, he was clearly a welcome one.

It is impossible to overemphasise the critical importance of this period for my father. It may have been very late in the day, and his epiphany came not a moment too soon, but he was being presented with a model lesson in how to play happy families. Demonstrably, showing and receiving love and affection was normal. The more he observed it, the easier it looked. And not only that: the little clan on Broadway continued to make their growing affection for him abundantly plain. Mary Claire had confided in her mother and Barbara went out of her way to make the young Englishman feel loved and welcomed into the family. His confidence soared.

It was wonderful. It was a revelation. It was, as I say, my father’s salvation. But he still carried his interior scars. They would never be completely healed.

Chris and Mary Claire were married in Tillsonburg on 13 October 1951. The bridegroom was twenty-three, the bride nineteen. He cocked up his wedding vows, saying: ‘I hereby troth thee my plight’ and she was not allowed even a thimbleful of champagne at the reception. Mary Claire was old enough to get married but, under Canada’s strict alcohol prohibitions, too young to drink.

She was old enough to bear children too. My mother fell pregnant almost at once and ten months later gave birth to a
daughter–Elizabeth Barbara Madeley. Telegrams were sent: mother and baby doing fine.

But the father wasn’t. Chris was still desperately thin and working extra shifts for his newspaper to earn enough to keep his little family. He was exhausted after eighteen-hour days and seemed to have no resistance to infections. Heavy smoking didn’t help and after a vicious bout of bronchitis his new wife took charge.

‘We can’t carry on like this, Chris. You’re going to wear yourself out. You
are
worn out. And Elizabeth and I hardly ever see you. We have to think of something else.’

My father nodded. ‘All right. But what? It took me months to get the job I have now.’

The couple both had aunts living in Windsor, the big industrial city which stared across the border into America and ‘Motown’–Detroit. My mother considered this a while, and then seized the moment.

‘Let’s go to Windsor–today, right now. There’s plenty of work there and we can stay with our aunts while we get fixed up.’

And so my slightly bewildered father found himself catching the last train from Tillsonburg that evening with his wife and baby, headed for the US border and Windsor, Ontario. Next morning the couple walked into the city’s Employment Centre and walked out with job interviews at the giant Ford of Canada plant. An hour later they were on the payroll–Mary Claire was assigned to production planning, Chris, with his journalistic experience, to the communications department, in effect, the press office. He would work for Ford in public relations until the day he died.

Once again Mary Claire was my father’s saviour. With kinder hours and better pay he began finally to put on some weight, and he was energised and uplifted by the turn their lives had taken.

He also had more time to spend getting to know his growing daughter. My mother says he was an infinitely gentle, tender father. Like all new fathers he had to feel his way, but he had very little experience from his own childhood to call on. He had to rely on what he’d learned in the McEwan family home. That, as it turned out, served well enough.

But my mother says he seemed to have an instinct for it anyway. Becoming a father was enormously important to him. I think he felt fatherhood, and marriage, defined him properly for the first time in his life.

But, as well as learning to define himself, Chris was also attempting to define his wife. She had harboured thoughts of returning to the stage, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Today, we might call his attitude ‘controlling’.

My father met my mother when she was playing the female lead in a light romantic comedy, and it had involved some stage kisses. This was all very well then; now she was his wife, he could not bear the thought of her in the arms of another man. And it might not just be as part of a local amateur production–a casting agent who had seen my mother’s work wanted to represent her professionally. Who knew where that might lead? And with whom?

It would not be the first time in her marriage that Mary Claire was forced to ponder the implications of her wedding-day vow to ‘obey’ her husband.

Mostly, the pledge was not invoked. But occasionally my father’s insecurities surfaced and he restricted her. It was an issue that affected many women of my mother’s generation, and one that would not be confronted until the rise of feminism.

So she renounced any remaining ambitions to pursue a theatrical career, telling friends she was happy to be a wife and mother. Although this was not without a large degree of truth, there was definitely an element of pretence. Years later, when she wanted to drive, my father refused to allow it, even though she had passed her test as a teenager in Canada and was confident she would pass a UK examination. My mother told everyone that it was a matter of cost, but again this was only partly true. The main issue was her husband’s superstitious fear that a driving wife might just one day drive away from him for good.

She was quite unable to reassure him that this was nonsense, any more than she had been able to convince him she had no intention of running off with her next leading man. Her eventual response was to accede gracefully to his demand. Recently I asked her why.

‘It was partly the times, Richard,’ she told me. ‘Things were just…different for women like me then. But also I simply didn’t want to make him unhappy.

‘Yes, I wanted to act and I wanted to drive–quite badly sometimes–but not
that
badly, you see. We were so happy together and, anyway, I’d known he was insecure when I married him, hadn’t I? He’d told me everything. I loved that I had managed to take some of that insecurity away
and make him stronger. Why would I want to endanger that?’

I hope he knew how lucky he was. I think so.

If Chris looked out of his new office window he could see straight into the smokestacks of mighty Detroit across the narrows that marked the Canadian–US border. He began to think about transferring to America. The pay was better, opportunities were greater…why not?

Because of my mother’s teeth.

Mary Claire cleared away her husband’s supper plate in the kitchen of their little flat in Windsor, checked the baby–now more of a toddler–was still asleep, and cleared her throat. She had been dreading this conversation since getting the news that afternoon, but it had to be had.

‘Darling…you know I went to the dentist today.’

‘Sure, honey.’ After several years in Canada, Chris now spoke in an unaffected North American accent.

‘Well…it’s not good news.’

‘What? You’re not ill with something, are you?’

Mary Claire shook her head. ‘No, it’s not anything serious…just expensive. He told me I have to have all my teeth out–
all
of them, Chris–and have false ones made and it’s going to cost a thousand dollars!’ She burst into tears.

Chris was aghast. ‘But of course that’s serious! We haven’t got a thousand dollars. We haven’t got a hundred dollars.
Christ, it’d be cheaper to take a boat to England and get you fixed on the National Health!’