Читать книгу Boy from Nowhere - Allan Fotheringham - Страница 8

To the Garden of Eden

As I mentioned, Regina is fifty miles north of Hearne. For a nine-year-old that was like going from Kansas to Manhattan. But my world became my new school, the unfortunately named Wetmore Elementary where I entered grade three. I had an early interest in school games, which were a precursor to my interest in sports. At recess and noon hour the favourite game was dodge ball. Because I was so quick on my feet, I always won. This was a good game that stood me in good stead when, in the future, I had to dodge arrows in the journalism business.

But, by a fluke, and this was a formative thing in my life, there was a public library just doors down from our home on Broder Street. I was raised in a house without books. The only thing I had to read as I grew up was Chatelaine and Ladies’ Home Journal. (Some clue to my later understanding of women?) I discovered this library and took out two books a week, all by the same author. They were about the collie Lad of Sunnybank by Albert Payson Terhune.

This is where it all began.

Years later in journalism I was accused of using commas too much. The other day I found an old copy of Lad of Sunnybank in which my beloved author writes: “Lad, getting up in the morning, would delight in the sunshine, before he went down to the creek, to look at the cattle.” I laughed my head off because I could see how I had fallen in love with commas. It was his fault.

At school the other kids always asked: “Why is your name Scott and your family’s name Fotheringham?” So my stepfather decided to legally adopt us and change our surname. I didn’t like the idea. But at the age of nine, I didn’t have much clout. I was no longer Murray Allan Scott. Years later I read about a Brooklyn boy who was born Bernard Schwartz who was going nowhere as an actor until Hollywood changed his name to Tony Curtis. Roy Harold Scherer, Jr., became Rock Hudson. Archibald Leach? Cary Grant. Not to mention Norma Jeane Mortenson later Baker — Marilyn Monroe.

When I got into newspapering, the byline Allan Fotheringham had a faint rhyming sound to it, a name easy to remember as it turned out. Murray Scott? Dead meat. I was lucky, as usual.

Doug Fotheringham, with a high school education, must have been very good at numbers, because he rose swiftly in the Canadian Army and became a paymaster and Captain Fotheringham. The army told him they were transferring him to Camp Chilliwack, sixty-five miles east of Vancouver in far-off British Columbia, and since he was a non-fighting soldier, just signing cheques, he asked if he could move his family to British Columbia, assuming he would be there for the rest of the war. He did so, and the army, being the army, immediately shipped him overseas.

That meant my mother, happily married, became a “widow” once again for the rest of the war. Years later my mother told me the story of Doug writing home from overseas and warning her to take a good look at the walls because when he got home she would only see the ceiling. I think this was the standard joke among soldiers and was written to dozens of brides left behind.

By the time Doug returned, I, of course, was a snotty-nosed teenager and out of control. I wasn’t going to take any guff from a guy I hardly knew. This caused problems. I can remember one supper when the tension was such that not a single word was spoken throughout the meal between four children, my mother, and my stepfather.

When Doug first arrived in British Columbia, he answered an ad in the Chilliwack Progress, the local weekly, which said that a family would take in a soldier — “non-drinking and non-smoking.” So he went to the famed home of Oliver Wells, who had geese and cattle and was a world-renowned breeder and corresponded with people of his ilk around the globe. They had a house for a farmhand on the property and said it could accommodate his family of four children and a wife. We took a train, never having been on one before, from Regina and travelled forever over the Rocky Mountains, seeing raging rivers and deep canyons and snowy peaks. Being from the flat prairie, we had never seen a hill.

We arrived on a Saturday morning and took a ferry across the Fraser River. At the Wells estate, which was called Edenbank, there were cattle a-sloshing in the Luk-a-Kuk Stream below a huge home with large Canadian geese strolling across a lawn. It was fall, and lush apples and pears were falling from trees in the brilliant sunshine. I actually thought we had arrived in the Garden of Eden. I was ten years old.

The Wells family was what one would call these days the Establishment. They introduced my mother to the Carman United Church. The small town of Sardis, perhaps two hundred souls, was divided into those who went to church and the heathens who didn’t. My mother, who had a musical background, having taught violin at the age of seventeen in Hearne, was embraced in this ambience and wound up leading the choir for forty years. My sister, Donna, sang in the choir. Doug, when he came home from the war with his swift knowledge of figures, became church treasurer. It was the essence, the country club of this little town. You either belonged to it or you didn’t. It was the pillar of my mother’s life for the rest of her ninety-seven years.

We were forced to go to Sunday School every week accompanied by our mongrel dog Butch, who followed us, and being a religious dog, waited faithfully outside every Sunday. I, cutting out from church after Sunday School, was assigned to go home and put in the oven the ritual Sunday roast of beef. Often I stopped at the local basketball hall (Butch dutifully waiting at the entrance), perfecting skills that were going to take me to the Olympics, and forgot to go home. My parents would arrive back from church with the stove not on and the roast not arriving until two hours later. These weren’t happy moments.

There was one stretch where I didn’t miss Sunday School for five years. I received medals for this achievement, which I can produce today. I was also once directed to sit down and sign a formal pledge (I was twelve years old!) that liquor wouldn’t cross my lips forever. Such are the dreams of adult Christians.

However, in the same church some years later, I fainted while my brother and his wife were having the christening of their first child. I had been out rather late the previous evening in Vancouver, and my sister, Irene, and her husband had to wake me up for the sixty-five-mile drive to the ceremony in Sardis. Me, with no breakfast, noticed in the middle of singing a hymn that the words in the hymn book seemed to go fuzzy. I couldn’t understand this, and the next thing I knew I went crashing down in my pew. Sister Donna, who was in the choir, and stepfather Doug, also in the choir, rushed down and escorted me out to the fresh air to revive me quickly. My brother, whose proud moment this was, has never quite forgiven me.

I attended Sardis Elementary, across the road from Edenbank. What a change from Hearne where we often walked the three miles. This was a hundred yards. There was a game in which the kids got down on hands and knees and tried to somersault over one another without touching each other. I used to win all the time since I could somersault over twelve kids.

At recess I also used to amuse the whole gang. There was a wimp called Jimmy Block, who I beat up. Oddly, he enjoyed it. Everyone watched while I ripped off his clothes and threw them up a tree. When the bell rang to signal the end of recess, he had to scramble up the tree to get his clothes. Thus he was always late for class and the teacher always asked why he was late. It was amusing at the time, but — hello there, Dr. Freud — it isn’t one of my proudest memories. I have often wondered what happened to Jimmy Block. I have never heard from him.

One day for some crazy reason I ran away from home. I slept in the hayloft of a barn. The town was so small that the word got around and my parents knew where I was. They decided to wait me out. It lasted two days, and they were the victors. I now thoroughly understand the strategy of a SWAT team. Lack of food and sleep works every time.

At the end of the year, when we were in grade six before going to Chilliwack Junior High School, my teacher said we would be taking either one of two directions. Either a university entrance program or a general program. She openly said to students what program each would be taking. “Lorraine [who was the smartest person in the class], you will be going into the university program. Allan, you will, as well….” There were four of us who made the cut. The rest, in her mind, were going to be placed in the general program. No hope for the rest of them. Just us four.

My first step to the heights of journalism was in the United Church Observer, a national journal for all its churches across the country. The paper awarded prizes for the juvenile section. I sent in a poem about a castle in Spain. I have no idea how I picked that. I won first prize. The prize? Five dollars. I was a pro. I was in grade five. I was ten. The poem had a very idealistic, romantic theme. Here it is:

The Castle

High on a hill, the castle stands

The home of knights from many lands

Lonely and desolate, still she lies

The mark between the earth and skies

Witness of furious fights galore

Which reached right to the strong oak door.

Many attacks her defenders stood,

Fighting on though smeared with blood.

Sentries no longer pace the walls,

Nor knights and earls feast in the halls.

Now this fortress lies in ruins,

Stone arches now a cave for bruins;

Surrounded by an empty moat,

Now the pasture for a goat,

The castle, all her glory taken,

Lies empty, quiet and forsaken.

I find it funny that my start in a writing career was on a romantic theme and that I am now regarded as a cynic due to my satiric approach to politics and politicians. I also find it interesting that sixty-one years later my lovely seven-year-old granddaughter, Quinn, wrote her first short story on a romantic theme (set in a castle) and at age ten won the opportunity to have one of her poems published in a book in which the poetry was chosen from across the nation. Subsequently, my other beautiful granddaughter, Lauren, has published both her poetry and a short story.

At the end of grade six we took the school bus to Chilliwack Junior High, three miles away. On the first day, when we went into woodwork class, our teacher showed us a T-square. He said, “This is the most precious tool you will ever have and you must take care of it and never abuse it.”

He left the class for a minute, so I took my T-square and pretended to beat it on my desk like a sledgehammer. I then felt this large, very large hand on my neck. He had found the class smartass and was going to kill me.

We then had a small gym for basketball, and I was very good at this as I had learned it at Sardis Elementary. (They had had a rough little outdoor court.) One day I got into a fight with another kid on the court. The principal asked the two of us to report to the gym at noon hour. He had two pairs of boxing gloves. He gave them to us and told us to put them on. He said, “You two are such smartasses, you have one hour to pummel each other.” He wouldn’t allow anyone else in but sat there and watched us for an hour. Many times we asked if we could stop. He would say, “Nope, you have forty minutes left.” After the hour, we were absolutely exhausted. We could hardly stand up. I think we learned our lesson.

After junior high school, we went to Chilliwack Senior High, which had grades nine to thirteen. The last grade was called Senior Matric (senior matriculation) in those days. While in my first year, I carried on with my woodwork classes. And lo and behold, my teacher was a man named Laurence Peter, who was famed for his wild temper. One day while we class cut-ups, bored as usual, were stuffing sawdust in the ear of the class wimp, Peter was so enraged that he hurled a chisel at one kid and cut him over an eyebrow.

Years later, while working at the Vancouver Sun, I read a one-page piece in Esquire introducing to the world “The Peter Principle: everyone in any organization gets promoted one level above their level of competence.” I ripped it out and pinned it on the Sun notice board where within minutes all of the reporters were laughing their heads off because it described, exactly, our newsroom. The Sun had taken the top reporter and made him city editor where he was a disaster. The former city editor was made the managing editor, even though he was completely incompetent.

I asked my researcher to find out who this genius Laurence Peter was. She came back three days later and said he was in charge of the University of Southern California’s department studying handicapped children. She had traced his previous career from Western Washington College to the University of British Columbia to Chilliwack Senior High School. I almost fainted. This was my woodwork teacher. I tracked him down, we became good friends and dined together, and he told me he had devised his now-famous theory while at UBC when he discovered “that the reason academic politics were so vicious was because the stakes were so small.”

In the Depression days, when of course there was no TV and no movies within miles of our home, my mother and her siblings had to make their own entertainment. So they taught themselves how to play the banjo and piano, and someone always had a trumpet or saxophone. When my mother had four children of her own, she insisted that we all learn to play a musical instrument. I had listened painfully for years to my two older sisters taking piano lessons: Do-rey-me, do-rey-me. When it came my turn, I said, “No way am I going near that [hated] piano.”

“Well,” my mother said, “you’ve got to play something.”

I had seen an ad somewhere for guitar lessons. So I signed up for $45. On the day of my first lesson, my younger brother, Jack, and I were on the back of a flatbed truck, helping out as we often did the manager of the local feed store delivering sacks of whatever to the local farms. Jack and I never did get along, so we got into a fight and he pushed me off the truck. Unfortunately, it was travelling more than forty miles per hour, and I landed in the ditch with a broken wrist. That was the end of my musical career, and you must understand this is why Elvis Presley hit the charts because this obviously was years before he was invented.

To this day, I cannot play a note, sing a note, or blow a note. But, boy, can I dance. (Ask the girls.) I regret this inability to play an instrument when I go back to Saskatchewan and the Clarke family gets together for a good old-fashioned noisy romp. I do enjoy these evenings as much as I do going to my publishing buddy Kim McArthur’s Christmas parties in Toronto where again every member of her family — grandparents, parents, and kids — play a musical instrument and we get together around the piano where her father, The Colonel, used to play sax as backup.

My first summer job was grafting roses in a nursery for 45 cents an hour. My next job was being a cherry picker, weekends and summers, for 5 cents a pound around the time there was a Chilliwack Annual Cherry Festival. I worked in a frozen food factory where my job was to spread peas over huge wire pads. I also worked in another frozen food place where we carried sides of beef off boxcars and there was practically one worker per week taken to hospital with a broken foot because a forty-pound salmon, frozen stiff, was like dropping a bowling ball on your pinkie. I worked in the Sardis post office during Christmas holidays licking stamps and sorting mail, and I now know the names of every small town in Saskatchewan and Manitoba where the mail was headed.

I also tried to get into the high wages of the logging industry and went to the Silver Skagit logging camp near Hope, British Columbia. I had to buy a pair of caulk logging boots, with special spikes in the soles, for $50. I was sixteen years old, and there was no training. I just showed up. On my second day I found myself, as “high loader,” far up on a sixteen-wheel logging truck while a huge crane dropped swinging ten-foot-thick tree trunks so as not to crush me by coming down on my head. I lasted two days and didn’t even make enough to pay for my boots. Besides, I was a coward. The B.C. logging industry has the highest number of fatalities per capita of any industry in Canada.

For the school paper I was writing a column called “High School Highlights.” Les Barber, editor/owner of the weekly Chilliwack Progress, saw it and asked me to do a column for his paper. I took it down to him, and he later said he was astonished because he didn’t have to change a single word. I was writing these things, of course, in longhand. Les paid me for a weekly column, and it suddenly occurred to me that I should learn to type.

In grade twelve I enrolled in a typing class, which was composed of thirty grade nine girls. I was the only boy, and the whole basketball team fell down laughing and ribbed me forever. So while the guitar lessons didn’t work, the typing lessons certainly did. Obviously, I didn’t know then that it would set me off in a career in journalism.

I wrote a column about a student experiment that involved feeding rats — in school corridor cages — Coke and junk food. We all know the resulting conclusions. A stiff-necked Coca-Cola lawyer threatened to sue for patent violation. (I was in high school, for Christ’s sake!)

My major achievement was at the end of the year — the election of the boys’ Senior Ring to head the student council. It was the “big swinging dick” of the school, and you had to have a B+ average. So my fellow jock friends couldn’t go for it. They said I was a cinch. The day of the speech, which was outdoors on the grass, the whole school came out. At least half the school came by bus from a Mennonite community outside Chilliwack. Being Mennonite, they weren’t allowed to stay after school, go to school dances, or turn out for sports. But they came to hear the speech.

At that time the trendy male thing was to have a streak of blond hair at the front, done with peroxide. I got up to give my speech with my peroxide streak, wearing green corduroy strides, which were twenty-six inches at the knee and six inches at the ankle. I had picked up a pair of saddle shoes in Vancouver and wore them. I got up in front of the Mennonites, looking like some stranger from space, and lost by four votes to Dave MacCaulay. Who went on to become superintendent of schools in Chilliwack. Dressed properly. Never got out of Chilliwack. Big mistake.

I didn’t have enough money to go to university, so I took Senior Matric, which was the equivalent of grade thirteen. The fee was $112, which I didn’t have to pay until after Christmas. I had no way of getting the $112 before then, so I figured I’d play basketball until Christmas and then quit.

Before that could happen, one day we noticed the principal standing with several men watching us as we changed classes. They hung around most of the day. I was doing the usual dumb things — punching the guys and goosing the girls as we walked down the halls. It turned out the men were from the National Film Board and were making a film called Breakdown. They were going to film it in Chilliwack, as a typical small Canadian town, and at Essondale, a mental hospital (as it was referred to in those days), which was fifty miles away.

They were looking for a typical young Canadian boy to play the younger brother to the professional actress playing the main part of someone having a nervous breakdown. So they called me in and said they had selected me, and I got the $112 for my final year in secondary school. University, here I come! Little did I know this brief encounter would be a precursor to my career.

The NFB paid me by the day, and it took several hours for shooting. At one stage I was to pull up to a gas station in a car. There was only one problem. I didn’t know how to drive. My parents didn’t have a car, and all of my buddies never stopped laughing because I was such a dolt in this regard. We had several runs at this shot because I only had to move the car about ten feet. I got it right for most of the shots except one. I let out the clutch too fast, and the car jumped in the air.

The “world premiere” of the film was at Chilliwack’s only movie house and, of course, practically the whole school was there. And, of course, when it came to the shot at the gas station, they ran the one in which I goofed. The entire audience, including all my buddies, burst out laughing and continued for some five minutes.