Читать книгу John Diefenbaker - Arthur Slade - Страница 11

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“I’m going to be prime minister!”

The Métis man with the fierce, determined eyes was known to have killed at least a dozen men during the Riel Rebellion of 1885. He sat in the Diefenbaker house, a gun at his side. He was sixty-eight years old, but his hair was dark black. It had been parted to hide the scar from a bullet that had grazed him during the rebellion.

His name was Gabriel Dumont.

Young John Diefenbaker, just eight years old, couldn’t stop staring at the stranger. John’s heart raced. He knew this guerrilla fighter had guided the Métis to victory during the Battle of Duck Lake, less than twenty years ago. That battle had been fought only a few kilometres from the Diefenbaker home, staining the snow red with blood. Prime Minister John A. Macdonald ordered General Middleton to take the Canadian army by train to the territories and end the fighting. Over five thousand soldiers descended on Batoche, with Gatling guns and cannons blazing. The Canadian army won, Dumont fled to the United States, and Louis Riel, the rebel leader, was hanged. Fifteen months later the government issued a general amnesty to all the rebels, hoping to quell feelings of anger in Quebec over Riel’s death.

Young John couldn’t believe Dumont was here – right in their house. He had stopped by for a visit while hunting game. Everything about the man was intimidating; his size, his demeanor, his dark, serious eyes. He was part of history. John didn’t know if he trusted Dumont, but he did admire him.

Dumont would be the first of many famous men whom John Diefenbaker would meet in his lifetime. In the following years, Diefenbaker grew to understand why the Riel Rebellion had been fought and recognized the problems faced by the First Nations people, the Métis, and the less fortunate in Canada. But on the day Gabriel Dumont had dropped by their home on the prairie, John was still a child. A little frightened, a little worried, but sitting on the edge of his chair ready to pick up any new revelations about Canada’s history.

William Thomas Diefenbaker, John’s father, was born in Ontario and never intended to move west. He was a short man, with a friendly face and well-trimmed mustache and the wide-eyed look of a dreamer. He also loved books and trained in Ottawa to be a teacher. His second love was politics: he spent his spare time in the House of Commons gallery watching the Canadian government in action. John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, was serving his last year in office. An election was brewing and William heard many grand speeches. “The House of Commons lived for him,” John Diefenbaker later explained, “and it lived for me when I heard him recount the events he had witnessed and stories of the parliamentary personalities he had seen.”

William began his life as a teacher and, oddly enough, one of his students was a boy named Mackenzie King, who would one day become prime minister. In 1894 William Diefenbaker married Mary Bannerman, a strong-willed, straight-backed woman of Scottish descent who was a devout Baptist.

On the 18th of September, 1895, their first son was born: John George Diefenbaker. He had clear blue eyes and soon grew an unruly mop of blonde hair (it would darken as he aged). He was a lad stuffed full of questions, eager to know everything. He could be a precocious little devil too. He enjoyed watching aristocrats from Toronto, out for a Sunday drive, pass by his home town in their newfangled electric cars. Whenever one of the untrustworthy vehicles broke down, leaving the rich men and women stuck kilometres from home in their best clothes, John would dash up and taunt them with questions like, “Do you think it will ever start again?” This led to the men yelling and stamping their feet while John ran giggling away.

Lucky for John he was not alone in his youthful adventures. His brother, Elmer, was born in 1897. Elmer was an outgoing and happy-go-lucky child, the perfect sidekick. Diefenbaker later wrote, “Our relationship over the years approached that often described but seldom encountered ideal.” In other words, they were brothers and friends.

But John had a serious side as a child too. He became acquainted with black boys who were often badly treated by others. Even at this early age John said, “The idea of the poor being treated differently, the working man being looked down upon as a digit, filled me with revulsion.”

John’s idyllic childhood was interrupted by bad news: TB. In the spring of 1903 William was diagnosed with Galloping Consumption, a type of tuberculosis that affected both lungs. He was advised to seek the healthy benefits of the dry prairie climate. William immediately secured a position in what was then part of the North-West Territories, but is today known as Saskatchewan.

When the relatives found out the Diefenbakers were leaving Ontario to live in the sticks, Mary’s brother said, “What’s the matter with you? Going to that awful country where there’s nothing but bears and Indians – they’ll kill you!” This was exactly the wrong thing to say. Mary Diefenbaker, never one to back down once a decision was made, announced they were going to go no matter what.

The Canadian prairie was still a land of homesteads and opportunities, and the trains were packed with immigrants of all nationalities hoping to get a piece of prairie farmland and make a life for themselves. The Diefenbakers could only afford colonist class, with no sleeping accommodations and no dining car. Mary had prepared for this by sending blankets and food early to the train with William, but unfortunately a railway official gave William bad directions and he stored the supplies on the wrong train. The Diefenbakers got by with the help of fellow passengers who shared their food and blankets. At night, the boys slept tied to a wooden shelf on the wall so they wouldn’t fall out.

The cramped quarters and constant jostling got on William’s nerves. Part way to the Prairies, he announced they were returning to Ontario.

Mary narrowed her eyes. “We started out and we’re going on!” she said.

William insisted he’d go back on his own if he had to.

“If you do, the rest of us will carry on and you’ll come out sooner or later.”

William finally agreed she was right. This wouldn’t be the last argument he lost to Mary. “Well, you know,” he would often say, “Mary is always right. Sometimes I don’t think so at the time, but it always turns out to be the proper course to take.”

That course took them out of the trees and rocky land of the Canadian Shield and into the level prairie landscape. They went through Winnipeg and Regina, then headed northwest to Saskatoon (which only had a population of five hundred at the time) and finally stepped off the train in the town of Rosthern. After a two-night rest in the Queen’s Hotel, the Diefenbakers loaded their possessions into a wagon and bumped across the old prairie trails, steering around coulees lined with trees and fields of golden wheat. Finally, the Diefenbakers arrived at their destination: Tiefengrund school.

The Diefenbakers were now thousands of kilometres from their relatives in Eastern Canada. They didn’t know a soul, but that changed quickly because their living quarters were attached to the schoolhouse, which was also a community meeting place. Gabriel Dumont would drop in or sometimes members of the North West Mounted Police stopped, including the very officers who’d fought against Dumont. In fact, Sergeant Pook, a regular visitor who liked Mary Diefenbaker’s cooking, told tales of how enemy bullets twice tore through his clothing during the rebellion without hitting him. These stories stuck with John his whole life and gave him a pride in the Mounted Police that never faded. People from the reserve would stop by for tea, and their tales of Indian lore and history also had a deep effect on young John.

His father’s health stayed strong. William would often take John hunting and fishing, a recreation that John would enthusiastically pursue for the rest of his life. John also discovered a love for reading that equaled his father’s. There were always books in their home to be read by the light of a coal-oil lamp: Shakespeare, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and a broken set of Ridpath’s History of the World.

They celebrated the creation of the province of Saskatchewan on September 1, 1905. John’s father, who organized the celebration in Hague, bought a couple of dozen Union Jacks and put them up all across town. Then the villagers gathered in the schoolhouse to sing “The Maple Leaf Forever” and “God Save the King.”

One day, when he was nine years old, John was reading about Prime Minister Laurier. The book reminded John that he had an important announcement. Something that had been building inside his head for a long time. It was a declaration of who he wanted to be. Or was it his destiny? he wondered. Finally he looked up at his mother and said, “Someday I am going to be prime minister.” His mother, always serious, was silent for a long time. She hadn’t laughed, and he thought this was a good sign. She didn’t think he was making up a story. She told him it would be very difficult since he lived so far out on the Prairies, but she finished by saying, “If you work hard enough, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t.” John never forgot these words.

He was shy, though, and averse to public speaking. He attended meetings at the Farmers’ Institute with his father. These were information sessions about current problems like the difficulties in selling wheat on the market and how individual farmers weren’t able to stand up in court against farm machinery companies with faulty equipment.

During one of these meetings, John, now thirteen years old, became so upset about the way homesteaders were treated he launched himself to his feet and blustered, “This thing is wrong. Some day I’m going to do my part to put an end to this.”

The thirty or so people present applauded loudly. “I was so frightened,” he later wrote, “that I could hardly get out the words.”

He would soon overcome his stage fright.

Diefenbaker was a long way from reaching his goal of becoming prime minister of Canada. His family moved several times, and in 1910 came to Saskatoon so that John and Elmer would get a good education. Saskatoon had experienced a boom – over ten thousand people were now living in this frontier city by the river. John found a job as a newspaper boy and was soon selling the Saskatoon Phoenix, the Winnipeg Tribune, and the Calgary Eye-Opener. During this work, he had an encounter that would stay with him the rest of his life.

John was in a hurry. The rising sun painted the train station red. He rushed down to the unloading platform and gathered up his papers. He had to hand sell them, then get to school. He never had time to chit-chat with the other paper-boys or anyone else. He’d never get ahead that way.

Then a door to a private railway car opened. John paused to stare. Someone rich had to be inside, maybe a bigwig with the railway. A man dressed in a suit stepped out, breathed deeply of the prairie air. His thick hair was white as rabbit’s fur. He certainly looked important and dignified.

Then the man turned. John recognized his face. It was the prime minister of Canada, Sir Wilfrid Laurier. He was in town to lay the first cornerstone for the University of Saskatchewan. I bet I can sell a paper to him, John thought. He strode up to the prime minister.

Laurier smiled. He handed John twenty-five cents for a five-cent paper. John felt flushed with success. I’ll ask him a question about Canada, John decided. Laurier replied kindly and the two chatted casually for a few minutes about Johns interest in politics, and the tasks of being prime minister. But the paper-boy clock in the back of John’s mind was still ticking. He had to sell his papers. “Sorry, Prime Minister,” he announced, “I can’t waste any more time on you, I’ve got work to do.” And he hurried on to sell the rest of his newspapers.

This brief meeting became a turning point in John’s life: “Sir Wilfrid inspired me with the idea that each of us, no matter who he is or what his upbringing, or however humble his parentage and home, can rise to any position in this country, provided we dedicate ourselves.”

And so John set to dedicating himself. How do you become a politician? How do you become leader of the land? He read biographies and soon recognized there were two things he had to master to achieve his goal of getting into politics: public speaking and the law.

He was especially drawn to the law because he had read the biography of Abraham Lincoln, who had started as a small town lawyer and had risen to become the president of the United States. It seemed the obvious path to take.

John graduated from Saskatoon Collegiate in June of 1912. By September he was in his first year at the University of Saskatchewan, studying history, political science, and economics. He got a taste of politics by taking part in the university’s mock parliament and the first provincial Boys Parliament in Regina. In his second year he became the leader of the Conservative party in mock parliament and leader of the Opposition in the Boy’s Parliament.

By his third year the graduation issue of The Sheaf predicted that in forty years, in 1955, Diefenbaker would be the leader of the Opposition in the Canadian House of Commons. They were only off by one year.

But soon, John felt the call of war. Britain and the Commonwealth, including Canada, were locked in a deadly struggle against Germany in the fields of France. World War One had been underway for two years and John believed it was the duty of every able-bodied citizen to sign up.

In March of 1916 he enlisted. By May he received his commission as Lieutenant in the Infantry of the Active Militia, and on September 23rd, he boarded the SS Lapland and sailed for England.