Читать книгу Peter Gzowski - R.B. Fleming - Страница 9

— 1 — “Some Drastic Shaking Up, Early in Life,” ¹ 1934–1949

Families sustain themselves through self-deluding stories.

— Michael Billington, The Guardian Weekly, January 27–February 2, 2006

The light was fading from the cold winter sky hovering over Dickson Park. Across from the park, in the windows of the houses along Park Avenue, warm electric lights began to glow. Evening meals were being prepared. In the park a boy was playing hockey on the small man-made rink. The boy was Peter Brown. In his imagination, he was a hockey hero, perhaps Gordie Howe or Howie Morenz or Maurice “Rocket” Richard. He was playing in the deciding game of the Stanley Cup playoffs. The score was tied. The imaginary crowd grew silent. The boy was mumbling something to himself as he skated around that rink by himself, stick handling, zigzagging, making the familiar rasking² sound of blade on ice. Imaginary teammates were skating alongside, watching his every move. The boy moved closer and closer to the net of the opposing team.

Peter Brown — the once and future Peter Gzowski — was playing two roles. As he raced down the ice to score the winning goal, he was also giving the play-by-play commentary of the game. Not only was he a star of the National Hockey League (NHL), but he was also Foster Hewitt, the voice of hockey in English Canada throughout much of the twentieth century. Hewitt cried out, “Here comes Brown down the ice. He shoots! He scores!”³ The crowd went wild. They remained standing as the last seconds of the game ticked away. Peter Brown had scored the winning goal. He had won the Stanley Cup for his team. He basked in the accolades of the crowds that existed only in his imagination.

The hockey story is but one of many examples of Peter’s vivid imagination. The young Peter was typical of creative people. He required solitude to create, but he loved and needed an audience to praise his art. “Writing at its best is a lonely life,” noted Ernest Hemingway, one of Peter’s literary heroes. For the boy playing hockey by himself, it was also important that his supper was being kept warm in the family duplex across the street.

Peter’s mother, Margaret McGregor, and his father, Harold E. Gzowski, were members of prominent Toronto families. Margaret’s father was James McGregor Young, a lawyer and law professor who was born in 1864 in the village of Hillier, Ontario, near Picton.⁴ Peter liked to claim that the Youngs were “somehow related” to Sir John A. Macdonald, though when questioned once, his unconvincing response was that “Bay of Quinte Scots were all related.”⁵

In 1906, at age forty-two, McGregor Young married Alice Maude Williams, who was born in Winnipeg about 1880. Maude Williams was a good friend of Mabel Mackenzie, daughter of William Mackenzie, millionaire president of the Canadian Northern Railway. Maude’s sister, Jane, was married to Donald Mann, partner of Mackenzie.⁶ In May 1900, Maude visited the Mackenzies in Kirkfield, Ontario, northeast of Toronto. In Mabel’s visitors’ book, Maude signed her name and contributed a poem, which reads in part “Kirkfield, I love thee / How can I leave thee / Without a frown.”⁷ While Peter invented connections with John A. Macdonald and with “Uncle” Stephen Leacock, rarely did he let on that he was a grand-nephew of Sir Donald Mann, the railway baron.

Peter’s mother, Margaret, born in November 1909,⁸ was one of three children of McGregor and Maude Young, who enrolled her in Toronto’s Bishop Strachan School, a private institution for daughters of the wealthy. She also attended le Manoir, a private Swiss school, which Peter called a “lycée.”⁹ Afterward, according to Peter, she enrolled at the University of Toronto where she studied Latin, French, English, Spanish, history, and mathematics. There is a problem with Peter’s story: no record exists at the University of Toronto that a Margaret Young ever registered as an undergraduate, and there is certainly no evidence that someone with that name graduated with a bachelor of arts.¹⁰

In 1972, Peter told Pat Annesley that his mother went on to attend the University of St Andrews in Scotland “because no Canadian university would accept her at age fourteen,” and that at age nineteen she was awarded a master of arts from the same institution.¹¹ Records at St Andrews tell a slightly different story. In 1926, when she was sixteen, Margaret registered at St Andrews where she studied Latin, English literature, history, French, and philosophy. According to her records at St Andrews, Margaret, at age twenty, graduated in June 1930 and then returned to Toronto. Even during the Great Depression, the Youngs lived in fashionable parts of Ontario’s capital.¹²

One contemporary of Margaret at Bishop Strachan offers another version of Margaret’s story.¹³ While a student there, Margaret became pregnant, something that good breeding and mid-Atlantic accents were meant to preclude. Is that why she left for Switzerland? Was attendance at the University of Toronto invented in order to account for some of those missing years? There is another curiosity: in the early 1980s, a resident of a Toronto nursing home on Cummer Avenue, east of Bayview Avenue, claimed to be a sister of Peter Gzowski. She might have been delusional, or she might have been a half-sister born to the teenage Margaret. In any case, Peter used to visit her.¹⁴ During the late nineteenth century, the Gzowskis of Toronto were even more prominent than the Youngs. Sir Casimir Gzowski was an engineer and contractor who combined innate talent with political and personal connections to become, by the end of his life, an esteemed man. Born in St. Petersburg in 1813 into minor Polish nobility, he participated in a revolt against Russian imperialism in Poland and was exiled to the United States. In the 1840s, he made his way to Canada West where he became superintendent of public works in the London district. He made a small fortune on railway contracting, land speculation, engineering projects, and businesses connected with railways. Sir Casimir was a founder of the Toronto Stock Exchange and the city’s philharmonic society. His Toronto mansion, “The Hall,” near the corner of Bathurst and Dundas Streets, was a setting for fashionable gatherings throughout the last half of the nineteenth century. Sir Casimir’s friends and acquaintances included the political, business, and social elite of Canada and Britain. After fulfilling what H.V. Nelles, in Volume XII of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, calls “the late Victorian Canadian yearning for a romantic hero,” Sir Casimir died in Toronto in 1898.

His children married prominently and lived in large homes in leafy parts of Toronto. When Casimir S. Gzowski, son of Sir Casimir, died in 1922, he left a substantial estate valued at almost half a million dollars. Harold Northey Gzowski was a son of Casimir S. and grandfather of Peter, who called him the “Colonel,” though he really was a lieutenant-colonel.¹⁵ Harold N. was commander of the 2nd Divisional Engineers in Toronto, the successor to the militia unit raised by Sir Casimir to defend Canada against the Fenians. The Colonel graduated from the University of Toronto in 1903 in applied science. He served in the First World War as a major and worked on water filtration for the French Red Cross at Verdun. When Harold E., Peter’s father, was born in 1911, the Colonel lived at 60 Glen Road in north Rosedale, Toronto’s wealthiest neighbourhood. In 1927 the Colonel sent his only son to Ridley College in St. Catharines, Ontario. The stock market crash of 1929 made life less pleasant for many of the First Families of Toronto. Harold was pulled from Ridley, and the Colonel and his wife, Vera, along with son Harold and daughters Jocelyn Hope (Joy) and Vera Elizabeth (Beth), moved to more modest but still respectable accommodation at 63 Wells Hill Avenue near Austin Terrace and Casa Loma.¹⁶ Vera, the Colonel’s wife, taught school, and Peter’s father tried to sell insurance policies for Canada Life Assurance.

During the 1930s, the Colonel’s income was dependent on revenue from the Toronto Ignition Company, an Imperial Esso service station at 1366 Yonge Street, just south of Balmoral Avenue, close by the Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company. Across Yonge Street was the Deer Park Garage & Livery. The Colonel was also secretary-treasurer of the Queen City Bowling Alley. In the Toronto Star on January 26, 1979, Peter claimed that his grandfather invested in a gravel pit on Vancouver Island and once saved a Chinese employee from drowning, an unlikely story given the anti-Oriental mood of Canada at the time. At his gas station the Colonel, Peter wrote, “hired more men than he needed, and played darts with them in the basement.” In other words, the service station made little money.

Vera Gzowski, the Colonel’s wife, was one of three children of Judge Edward Morgan, whose daughter, Hope, studied singing in Paris. In an article in Canadian Living, Peter claimed that his grandmother and her sister once toured France, and that for the rest of her life, Vera pronounced English words of French origin as if they had never migrated across the English Channel. Peter didn’t say whether Vera called her husband “le Colonel,” à la française.

In his memoirs and elsewhere, Peter liked to claim that his parents were married “in one of those run-away deals” in Jamestown, New York.¹⁷ In an interview on CBC’s Life & Times, Peter added another detail, that his parents were divorced “almost before I was born.” They lived together “barely long enough to produce me,” he claimed in his memoirs. They were divorced “not long after I was born,” he wrote in The Morningside Papers.¹⁸ The story of the unwanted child who had forced his parents into an unsuccessful marriage was a figment of Peter’s imagination. The marriage and birth were perfectly respectable. Margaret Young married Harold Gzowksi in May 1932 in Toronto, and their only son was born more than two years later.

Life insurance wasn’t a hot seller during the Depression, so for the remainder of the 1930s, Harold left Toronto to look for work.¹⁹ The Colonel and Vera Gzowski welcomed Margaret and young Peter to their house near Casa Loma.²⁰ During summers, mother and son lived in Prince Edward County in eastern Ontario near Picton, where McGregor Young owned a cattle ranch.²¹ Years later one of Peter’s adoring Morningside fans, who had grown up in a general store close to Picton, told him that she remembered “a little blond baby whose first name was Peter and whose last name we couldn’t pronounce.” When he learned to walk, his mother dressed him in a sailor’s suit.

In 1937, Margaret was granted a bachelor of library science from the University of Toronto.²² The next year she and Peter moved in with her father at 112 Rosedale Heights Drive near St.Clair Avenue and Mount Pleasant Road. By that time, Margaret was employed at the book department at Eaton’s. Since government money for libraries, as for almost everything else, was in short supply, her choice of Eaton’s may have been forced upon her by the Depression. In 1939, Margaret was listed with the Young family at 481 Summerhill Avenue near Yonge Street, south of St. Clair Avenue. In one of these houses, Peter conducted an experiment. “I remember one night,” he wrote years later, “when I tried to see how close I could hold a candle to the curtains that billowed over my bed without setting them on fire.” When the curtains caught fire, he cried out for help. As his hysterical mother and grandmother Young doused the flames, his grandfather Young, who used to sing Peter to sleep with Stephen Foster melodies, burst into rounds of laughter.²³

Harold Gzowski, Peter’s father, during the Great Depression at Larder Lake around Christmas, mid to late 1930s. The photo was apparently taken by John Taylor, who, in 1987, when he sent it to Peter, lived in Breslau, Ontario.

(Courtesy Trent University Archives, Gzowski fonds, 01-004, box 1, folder 1)

Perhaps because of Harold’s constant absence, his marriage with Margaret was terminated about 1938 when Peter was four.²⁴ In the 1930s, there was only one cause of divorce: provable adultery. The aggrieved spouse needed witnesses or a confession.²⁵ In Life & Times, Peter speculated that his mother always remained in love with his father even after she remarried, a story that may say more about the second than the first marriage. On the rare occasions when Margaret spoke to Peter about his father, she would tell Peter that he reminded her of Harold.²⁶

Sometime in 1939, Margaret, and likely Peter, too, moved once again, this time to a house at 30 Edith Drive in the Eglinton Avenue and Avenue Road district of Toronto. In the Toronto City Directory for 1940, Margaret was listed as co-owner with Edward Feather, who, with a business partner, operated a sheet metal works at 198 Dupont Avenue near Spadina Avenue. Margaret, it seems, was searching for a surrogate father for her son, and also for a husband with enough income to provide a more secure living. Not once in his memoirs, books, or scores of articles did Peter mention Edward Feather.²⁷ Meantime, Peter’s father enlisted to serve in the Second World War as a sergeant in the Royal Canadian Engineers. In London, on April 24, 1940, he married Brenda Raikes.²⁸ Margaret’s relationship with Edward Feather didn’t last long. On Saturday, October 19, 1940, according to the Globe and Mail, “Mrs. Harold Gzowski” was married to R.W. Brown of Galt at the home of Margaret’s aunt, Lady Mann,²⁹ a marriage that, according to Peter, was arranged so that his mother could be certain Peter would have a roof over his head and food on the table. Present at the large red-brick house at 161 St. George Street,³⁰ a few blocks north of Bloor Street, were the bride’s parents, as well as the Colonel and Vera Gzowski, Reg’s two brothers and their wives, and, among others, members of the Kingsmill and Hancock families. After a honeymoon trip north, probably through Muskoka or the Ottawa Valley, Reg and Margaret Brown settled in Galt. Soon after his mother’s remarriage, Peter’s surname was changed to Brown, largely, he explained in his introduction to A Sense of Tradition, his book on Ridley College, “to avoid awkward questions.”

Like many other towns in southern and southwestern Ontario at the time, Galt, whose population was about eighteen thousand, was home to a wide variety of manufacturing, including textiles, shoes, furniture, metal works, and machine shops. Reg Brown was sales manager of the Narrow Fabrics, Weaving, and Dyeing Co., which produced labels for towels, bedsheets, and shirts made in other small factories.

The war made housing scarce, and it was probably for that reason that the Browns rented the upper duplex at 24 Park Avenue, an attractive buff brick Victorian house on a street of well-tended lawns, shrubs, and flower beds. Dickson Park was across Park Avenue from number 24. The town itself was named for the Scot, John Galt, a member of the Canada Land Company, who was also a novelist and friend of the poet Lord Byron. Several acres in size, Dickson Park slopes gently toward the Grand River, which runs through old Galt, now the centre of Cambridge. From the upper duplex at 24 Park Avenue, Peter enjoyed a splendid view of the centre of Galt with its soaring church spires, solid Romanesque banks, and a neoclassical Carnegie Library, along with square-shouldered stone and red-brick factories that helped to make Galt secure. Over to the left, across the river, is the ponderous Galt Collegiate Institute, also made of local fieldstone. Galt was built by Scots stonemasons who longed for the “old country” and re-created it in the rolling, fertile lowlands of southwestern Ontario. Today, beautifully preserved, the centre of Cambridge looks much as it did when Peter was young.

Even as a child Peter was a great observer. In an article called “A Perfect Place to Be a Boy,” written as part of an introduction to Images of Waterloo County (1996), Peter painted a picture of a young boy who enjoyed sitting in the second-floor bay window at number 24, fascinated by seasonal rituals in the park. Each September the Galt Fall Fair was staged there amid the brilliant fall finery of the surrounding trees. “A midway filled the baseball diamond and spilled over around the bandstand,” he recalled, while “sheds and barns that stood unused for the rest of the year sprang to life.” A menagerie of farm animals, from sheep to pigs, horses and cattle, filled the park. “In the autumn air,” he continued, “the honkytonk of the midway barkers and the squeals of terrified rapture from the whirling rides mingled with the cries of roosters and the lowing of cattle, and the smell of candy-floss and frying hamburgers, mixed with the sweet aroma of the barnyard.”

Halloween, Peter remembered, allowed for “soaping windows and ringing the door on the school principal’s house before running madly away,” as well as “standing on one side of the road while a friend stood on the other, and when a car came by pretending to pull on an imaginary rope.” At a time when not every household had indoor plumbing, even in prosperous towns like Galt, an annual ritual at Halloween was knocking over an outhouse or two.³¹

Many of his memories of Galt, Peter claimed in an essay read years later on This Country in the Morning, were set in winter, and these memories included “a big dog that wouldn’t stop chasing my sled. Soakers from a winter creek. Making angels in the snow. The way the snow matted in your hair and around the edge of your parka.” He also recalled “nearly frozen toes and fingers, and the equally exquisite relief from a warming fire,” as well as hot chocolate and sleigh rides and snowball fights. And, of course, those endless hockey games over verglas fields.³²

In Galt, Peter was enrolled in grade one at Dickson School, located, like Park Avenue, on the west side of the river, about a twenty-minute walk south of Dickson Park. Even though he started grade one a bit late, he skipped one of the early grades, and thus spent slightly less than seven years at Dickson.³³ “They don’t build schools like they used to,” he mused on Morningside one morning in early February 1991, the day after he visited his old school. He talked about seeing a photograph of his old principal, “Pop” Collins,” and he spied himself and classmates in a class photograph taken in 1944 when he was ten. As he gazed at himself and his classmates, none of whom he had seen for years, “a thousand memories” tumbled through his mind:

Games of scrub and British Bulldog in the gravelled schoolyard, marbles and soakers in the spring, Mr. McInnis saying he could stick-handle through our whole hockey team backwards and Billy Parkinson saying no, sir, you couldn’t, you’d put yourself offside, Valentine notes to Georgina Scroggins, the smell of wet wool in the cloakrooms, cleaning the brushes on the fire escape, singing in the massed choirs on Victoria Day at Dickson Park, figuring out chess with Danny VanSickle — who plays bass with the Philadelphia Symphony, I think — Miss Zavitz’s grade two, Christmas concerts, VE day when we wove crêpe paper through the spokes of our bike wheels — I in Dickson’s blue and gold — and rode downtown and ...

He stopped mid-sentence, for he suddenly recalled that, during those idyllic years, Galt was a wartime city where WRENS marched and airmen from around the empire trained by flying over Dickson Park. There were war bonds, Victory gardens, and rationing. Children collected milkweed pods and the silver wrapping in cigarette packages. Peter learned the difference between a Messerschmitt and a Spitfire, and he and his mates played war games.³⁴ “My own most vivid memory of World War II,” Peter once wrote in Maclean’s, “is about riding my decorated bike in a parade to celebrate V-E Day.”³⁵

During any distant war, life on the home front goes on almost normally. Such was the case, apparently, in Galt during the Second World War. People played ball games in the park, and during the annual Galt Fall Fair, young people, but surely not Peter, hopped the fence surrounding the park in order to avoid the admission charge. Lois, one of Peter’s Morningside listeners, recalled the gangly boy she used to glimpse through the boards of the back fence as she rode her bike down the lane, past the large bush of yellow roses that pushed through the fence at 24 Park Avenue.³⁶ Jeanette, another schoolmate, remembered Peter’s beautiful blond hair and flawless olive complexion. Photographs verify that he was an attractive young lad. In most, Peter appears content, though in one he seems a bit overawed by his tall, well-dressed mother. As he peers up admiringly at her, as if waiting for some sign of recognition, she ignores him. With a slight and knowing smile on her round, attractive face, she is more interested in the camera and perhaps in the person taking her picture.

Photographs of Peter’s stepfather and Peter together either were not taken or have not survived. Uncle Reg, his nieces recall, could be difficult. He was a man of silences. Ed Mannion, whose family lived near the Browns, recalled Reg as rather brusque and difficult. Although Peter and Reg were never close, Peter admitted that Reg did, on occasion, slip over to the ice rink to watch his stepson play hockey, and perhaps to remind him that it was suppertime. In fact, on one occasion Peter called his stepfather “a very nice, decent man.” It was Reg who drove Peter, at about age twelve, to the family doctor when he was hit on the forehead by a stray puck, which, Peter claimed, had left a scar that “still creases my forehead, and which I still finger proudly when I stare in the mirror and think of the mornings in the winter sun.” It may have been Reg who encouraged Peter to hunt. In “The Pleasure of Guns,” an essay read on This Country in the Morning, Peter related an incident that happened when he was thirteen. “I shot a groundhog once,” Peter told his listeners, “and then I went and picked it up, and that was enough for me.”³⁷

Peter was on good terms with his step-cousins who lived nearby. One night, when he slept over at their house, he shared a bedroom with Shirley Brown. She was ten and he was six. The future broadcaster talked and talked well into the wee hours of the morning. Unknown to Shirley at the time, Peter had a childhood crush on her. An only child, Peter seems to have longed for conversation. From an early age, he loved to communicate. “When you’re the only pea in the pod,” observes journalist and memoirist Russell Baker, “your parents are likely to get you confused with the Hope Diamond. And that encourages you to talk too much.”³⁸ In his memoirs, published in 1988, Peter paints a sunny picture of the town. However, in 1982, during the first season of Morningside, he inadvertently revealed that there had been shadows. In an interview with Alice Munro, the fiction writer talked about Poppy Cullender, a character in her short story “The Stone in the Field.” Poppy was thought odd because he was single, and because he collected antiques. Poppy and the narrator’s mother were partners in an antiques business. Peter asked Munro to read from the story.

“There were farmhouses,” Munro read, “where Poppy was not a welcome sight.” Children teased him, and not a few women locked the door as he approached, his eyes rolling “in an uncontrollably lewd or silly way.” He usually called out “in a soft lisp and stutter, ‘Ith anybody h-home?’” In 1969, years before the government of Pierre Trudeau decriminalized homosexuality in Canada, Poppy went to jail for making harmless overtures to two baseball players on the train to Stratford.

At the end of the reading Peter suddenly blurted out that there was a Poppy Cullender in Galt. Immediately, he began to distance himself from that odd, unnamed man of his childhood. “He wasn’t close to me,” Peter insisted. “I didn’t know him.” Just to make sure that there was no parallel with Munro’s story, he added, “He wasn’t friends with my mother.”³⁹ It was an oddly defensive statement, especially for a man who painted himself as sympathetic to underdogs. Nowhere in his memoirs or elsewhere does this Poppy-type man appear, except in The Morningside Years, published in 1997, which includes the transcript of the interview with Munro.

Each summer Reg and Margaret Brown drove Reg’s Oldsmobile coupe⁴⁰ to the Gzowski compound on Lake Simcoe near Sutton, Ontario. Peter’s grandfather had purchased the lakeshore property from the Sibbald family around 1920. Reg and Margaret sometimes stopped for a visit and occasionally stayed overnight. Their purpose was to leave young Peter for the summer under the watchful eye of his grandparents. Peter always remembered the Colonel with affection. He was the only respected male authority in his young life. During part of one summer, so Peter once claimed, he attended Camp Nagiwa, a camp for boys on Ontario’s Severn River⁴¹ where, perhaps, he imagined himself participating in campfire singsongs, long hikes, and canoeing. If indeed he had ever attended a summer camp, it wasn’t Nagiwa, which wasn’t founded until 1954. ⁴²

In Galt, Margaret was able to put her library degree to good use. At the public library she became the children’s librarian. Years later several of Peter’s listeners wrote to him about the librarian they adored. Not only did she read to them, but she also allowed them to stamp return dates on borrowed books and to re-shelve returned books.

“Mother felt out of place in the Presbyterian stone town of Galt with its knitting mills and metal works,” Peter once noted. Her tastes were different from those of the average resident. She read Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and W.B. Yeats, and she spoke French. She also enjoyed jazz. And she took a fancy to mixed-doubles badminton. Margaret joined the local club, whose members played in the auditorium of the Galt City Hall on Main Street, a couple of blocks uphill from the Carnegie Library. There is a photograph, taken not long before her death, of Margaret posing with fellow members of the club. While the others look relaxed and happy, Margaret appears uncomfortable as she stands beside her badminton partner. Years later one of the players mailed Peter a copy of the photograph clipped from the local Galt newspaper. Peter kept the clipping on his desk at the main CBC building on Jarvis Street. One day, in May 1992, he showed it to Marco Adria, who was interviewing him. As he examined this photograph, Peter speculated, “Mother would not have been happy in the badminton club.”

Inside her “confining” marriage, Peter noted, his mother “chafed and strained.”⁴³ On an episode of Life & Times filmed in 1997, Peter remarked that Margaret was “very funny, very quick and ... very naughty.” Very naughty? What did he mean? That was the closest he ever came to acknowledging what appears to have been an open secret in Galt in the 1940s. One of the other people in the photograph of the badminton club offered a slightly different interpretation. “I admired her for her appearance and poise,” she recalled, “but not for her behaviour.” It seems that Margaret and her badminton partner were “more than friends.”

Alice Munro knows that in small towns there is rarely, if ever, a quiet affair. In her book Open Secrets, there is a story called “Carried Away,” which features a small-town librarian who favours a dark red blouse and has lips to match. “You could not say with any assurance that she had a bad reputation,” notes the narrator. “But it was not quite a spotless reputation, either.” Like Peter’s mother, Louisa the librarian once worked in the book department at Eaton’s. Louisa was rumoured to have had affairs with travelling salesmen.⁴⁴

During the interview with Marco Adria in 1992, Peter seemed artfully ignorant of the extramarital relationship. However, on school playgrounds children are prone to gossiping and teasing. The children who mocked Poppy Cullender in that other Munro story were typical of children everywhere. Peter’s use of the code word naughty on Life & Times suggests that he did know about his mother’s alleged affair. That his stepfather probably knew about it may explain why some people found him difficult.

In 1946, when Jack Young, Margaret’s cousin, was studying at the University of Western Ontario in London, he visited the Browns one weekend. He slept in Peter’s bedroom. That weekend Peter was “sleeping over” with a friend. On Saturday afternoon, the two boys “burst upon the scene like gangbusters.” They had just been thrown out of the matinee of a local theatre and were “quite pleased by the notoriety.”⁴⁵ No doubt they were indulging in typical matinee fare: a western or perhaps Abbott and Costello, two of Peter’s favourite comedians.⁴⁶

Almost immediately upon arrival, Young felt tension in the household. Margaret arranged a bridge game. She invited a male friend to join them. The friend mistook Jack for Mac, Margaret’s brother. “I remembered Reg’s indignation at such a thought,” Jack told Peter in 1996. Jack and Margaret were partners, and they won all evening. The next day before he boarded the return train to London, Jack and Margaret had a walk in a nearby park. “I still remember the English tweed suit she wore,” Young told Peter, “and her ‘sensible’ walking shoes. It was a beautiful, crisp, fall day.” Margaret talked about her son and described him as “an extremely bright boy bordering on genius.” She was certain that Peter would be a success.

In addition to books and bridge, Margaret also indulged in alcohol, cigarettes, and fine clothing, the accoutrements of the liberated woman of the 1940s. Because nylon stockings were made scarce by the war, Margaret took to staining her long legs “a silken brown,” and her young son, sitting on one of the twin beds in his parents’ bedroom, sometimes watched her as she carefully painted a faux seam on each leg “from her heel to the back of her knees.”⁴⁷ For one of her photographic portraits, she wore a beautiful fur stole draped around her elegant shoulders. She enjoyed trips to Toronto where she dined at the fashionable Arcadian Court at Simpson’s department store, high above the intersection of Queen and Yonge Streets.

Fascinated by drama, Margaret became active in the Galt Little Theatre. For Love from a Stranger, a murder-mystery produced for the 1946–47 season, she was assistant director.⁴⁸ In another production Peter played the role of his mother’s son. Margaret also performed in Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit,⁴⁹ a play about love the second time around.

The boy and his mother were always close. In those days, the biannual arrival of Eaton’s catalogue was always a time of excitement at farms and in small towns across Canada. The catalogues were full of colour photographs of toys and clothing and household wares that stimulated the imagination, especially during the Second World War when many goods were rationed. Peter always retained happy memories of snuggling up against his mother as they examined the catalogue page by page.⁵⁰

During one Christmas holiday, Peter folded gift boxes at Brown’s Jewellery Store on Main Street. Owned by the father of his good friend, Tom Brown,⁵¹ the store was located just up the street from the Carnegie Library. The money he earned bought a Christmas gift for his mother, perhaps something from the elegant jewellery shop decorated with two large, attractive urns imported from Japan by earlier generations of Browns. The boy was mad about hockey. One winter his mother dressed him in a scratchy white turtleneck with dark blue cuffs and waistband, which had once belonged to her brother. The sweater kept her son warm during bone-chilling mornings when he insisted on “slipping down the hill to the hockey rink before decent people were up.”⁵²

“I can feel that turtleneck now, rough and itchy under my ears,” he told Morningside listeners one day when he was introducing novelist Roch Carrier, well-known for his story about ordering a Montreal Canadiens sweater from Monsieur Eaton, who, instead, mailed the boy a Toronto Maple Leafs sweater.

Peter was so busy playing hockey in the park that he failed to catch a glimpse of the sixteen-year-old Gordie Howe, who was in Galt during the 1944–45 season as a member of the junior farm team of the Detroit Red Wings. At least that’s what Peter claimed in an article in 1965.⁵³ Fifteen years later he told fans of the Edmonton Oilers that, as a boy, he had indeed seen Howe in uniform, and he repeated that version of the story in The Game of Our Lives. He also bragged that, when he was about eight, Harry Lumley threw him over his shoulder into the local swimming pool. Eight years older than Peter, the young goaltender played for the farm team of the Red Wings, and therefore, like Howe, he may very well have been practising in Galt during the summer of 1942. In The Game of Our Lives, Peter’s imagination embroidered the Lumley story. Lumley was joined by fellow hockey player Marty Pavelich, and Peter was thrown into Willow Lake along with a whole gang of his friends.⁵⁴

Radio, the only broadcast medium then available in Canada, was a means of escape for Peter. It also helped to develop his imagination and taught him to listen. “Writers have to cultivate the habit early in life of listening to people other than themselves,” claims Russell Baker.⁵⁵ In his memoirs, Peter mentioned Abbott and Costello, Jack Benny, and other American radio entertainers, as well as CBC personalities such as the Happy Gang, Mart Kenney, and Lorne Greene. He also enjoyed radio drama. As she ironed on Monday evenings, Margaret listened to Lux Radio Theater, produced by Cecil B. DeMille, and Peter was there with her. He also began to pay attention to dramas produced by CBC Radio.⁵⁶

Until 1952, when Canadian television first aired, most Canadians had only heard hockey games, unless they were lucky enough to obtain tickets to games at Maple Leaf Gardens, the Forum in Montreal, or Detroit’s Olympia. Listening to hockey games on radio was an excellent way to develop the imagination. As the play-by-play was described by Foster Hewitt, the listener had to picture the players moving out of their own zone to stickhandle and pass into the opposition’s zone.⁵⁷ Like most boys his age, Peter supplemented his imagination by collecting photographs of National Hockey League players, courtesy of Beehive Golden Corn Syrup, whose labels, when mailed to company headquarters, brought an autographed photograph of a favourite player. Peter also filled scrapbooks with articles about hockey and photographs of players clipped from Galt’s Daily Reporter, which he delivered six days a week. He may also have clipped articles and photos from the London Free Press and Liberty magazine, both of which he delivered for a short time. At about age eleven he heard Syl Apps, a native of Galt, speak at the annual hockey banquet in Galt.

During the 1945–46 season, Peter first witnessed an NHL game. Gregor Young, his favourite uncle, was a returned soldier who found work in the advertising department of Imperial Oil, sponsor of the hockey broadcasts. The company gave Young two tickets. Uncle and nephew were ushered up to the Gondola, the large broadcast booth floating high above the ice of Maple Leaf Gardens. Peter was thrilled to sit close to Foster Hewitt, whom he could see through soundproof glass. Peter and his uncle were handed earphones that allowed them to listen to Hewitt as his voice went across Canada and Newfoundland. The excitement at being in the Gardens, and so close to Hewitt, as well as the unaccustomed height above the ice, made Peter nauseous. “I tore my earphones off in a moment of frenzy,” he recounted in his memoirs, “and banged them on the shelf. The impact echoed through Foster’s microphone and out to hockey fans in Canada and Newfoundland and on the ships at sea.” In reality, of course, Peter’s earphones did no such thing. Otherwise Hewitt and listeners from Vancouver to St. John’s would also have picked up every word of conversation between Peter and his uncle. Ten years later Peter varied the story by claiming that he had assisted Hewitt that evening.⁵⁸

Even as a child, Peter was passionate about golf, and Margaret and Reg encouraged him “to swing a sawed-off club at some old balls on the front lawn.” When Peter was about ten, the Colonel also gave his grandson tips on golf. “Pr-r-retend there-r-re’s a big spike r-r-running r-r-right up your ar-r-rse and out thr-r-rough your-r-r head, laddie,” the Colonel would tell Peter. In his sports column in Saturday Night twenty years later, Peter explained that his grandfather trilled his r’s because his ancestors were Polish.⁵⁹ Under his grandfather’s tutelage, Peter soon learned to break eighty. “That summer,” he noted in an article in Saturday Night in 1966, “I entered myself in the qualifying round for my age group in the Ontario Junior Tournament.” On the day of the tournament, he rose early in order to practise. “Around mid-morning,” Peter recalled, “the other young players from my hometown came to drive me to the Cheddoke course in Hamilton.” Peter even brought his own caddy, the only player to do so.

In June 1947, Peter graduated from Dickson Public School. That summer of his thirteenth birthday he worked at the Waterloo Golf and Country Club in Galt for two dollars a day, fourteen hours a day, seven days a week. Early each morning he rode his bike to the club where he cleaned the shower room, gathered up soggy towels and beer bottles, and emptied ashtrays. In the canteen, he sold coffee, cigarettes, and chocolate bars. On Wednesdays he served cold beer to doctors and businessmen, including his stepfather, none of whom worried about circumventing the strict liquor laws of Ontario. Even the local police chief, so Peter once claimed, came into the canteen “to buy his illegal beer from me for 25 cents a bottle.” On slow days, the club professional taught Peter how to play golf. When Peter biked home, still smelling of beer, his mother suspected that he had been drinking.”⁶⁰ Peter read widely. Among his favourites were Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches, Ralph Connor’s Glengarry novels, and Ernest Thompson Seton’s Two Little Savages.⁶¹ Peter also read Chums, Boy’s Own Annual, Rudyard Kipling, Charles Dickens, Walter Scott, A.A. Milne, and William Wordsworth. Like students of his generation and the next, he probably memorized Canadian poets from Bliss Carman to Archibald Lampman and Duncan Campbell Scott, whose smoky hills, crimson forests, and lumbering potato wagons were iconic Canadian images. In Moose Jaw’s Times-Herald in 1957, Peter’s list of childhood favourites also included American novels such as My Friend Flicka and Tom Sawyer, as well as Captain Marvel comics. By age twelve, Peter had accumulated a large number of books, so Jack Young observed when he visited 24 Park Avenue in October 1946.⁶²

The poems of William Henry Drummond, whose main characters were caricatured habitants speaking in fractured English, were on the curriculum at Galt Collegiate. In his memoirs, Peter claims that when he was in grade nine, Drummond spoke to a school assembly and read some of his poetry, which the adult Gzowski disparaged as “racist doggerel.”⁶³ Since Drummond died in 1907, whoever it was who came to Galt Collegiate that day in 1947, it wasn’t Drummond. At Galt Collegiate, Peter studied French, but like most Anglo-Canadians of his generation, and too many succeeding generations, he soon discovered that writing and reading a language didn’t prepare him for the spoken version.

Peter’s earliest extant piece of writing appeared in the 1948–49 edition of the Galt Collegiate Institute yearbook. In grade ten, he was a member of the junior basketball team. “When Kitchener came here unbeaten,” reported Peter Brown, who stands in the front row of the accompanying photograph,

[T]he juniors held them to a 28–26 game. Galt was beaten only when Kitchener scored with nine seconds remaining. In the season’s finale, Guelph came to Galt. In one of the most thrilling games seen here in a long time, Galt came from behind to almost tie the score but did not have quite the remaining drive to overcome a one-point lead. The score 22–21. The final analysis showed Bob Hoffman high scorer with 35 points, followed by Peter Brown with 26, and Jim Chaplin with 16. Jim Chaplin, a newcomer to the school, proved himself both an able captain and an excellent pivot man. Peter Brown — 10B.⁶⁴

Puberty wasn’t kind to the beautiful, olive-complexioned lad. Around the time of his short article, Peter developed bad acne, not only on his face but also on his back. The sores sometimes festered, and his nickname at Galt Collegiate was “Pus.” Just when his hormones were beginning to rage, he became unattractive to females, especially at the beach. In his memoirs, he hints that he had sex for the first time in a barn somewhere near Park Avenue. Toward the end of his life he provided details. “The apple-cheeked daughter of a farm family on the edge of town” pinned Peter “to the barnyard sod and brought a hitherto unknown — well, unknown in someone else’s company — feeling” to his loins.⁶⁵ There may have been few such encounters, and even that one sounds more like a scene from a short story.

Perhaps because of the acne, or maybe because he was a normal teenager, he began to rebel. In the fashion of post-war teenagers, he took to slicking down his hair with Brylcreem, possibly in emulation of Marlon Brando’s anti-establishment characters, whom he probably observed during “wild nights,” his phrase in an article in Canadian Living, at the local drive-in theatre. He also took to smoking clandestinely, though he didn’t fool his mother. When she confronted him, he confessed. She pulled out her Winchesters, offered him one, and warned him not to smoke so slyly. At age fifteen it was, and is, not uncommon for a teenager to question standards and patterns and to challenge parents, teachers, and anyone else who upholds those standards.

Although Peter claimed in his memoirs that he was an abysmal failure at Galt Collegiate,⁶⁶ a decade after the publication of those memoirs he painted a more optimistic picture. In 1998 he was interviewed by a staff member of Professionally Speaking, the magazine of the Ontario College of Teachers. In “Peter Gzowski’s Remarkable Teachers,” Peter recalled two remarkable English teachers. Helen Rudick “had a naughty turn of mind,” Peter told the interviewer from Professionally Speaking. She loved to embarrass the boys in her classes with double entendres. The other remarkable teacher at Galt Collegiate, Peter added, was “a wonderful man named Frank Ferguson.... He so obviously loved the works he taught, that you would put your own natural aversion to Shakespeare aside and say, ‘If he can get this enthusiastic it must be something.’”⁶⁷

When Ferguson first heard Peter’s voice on radio in the late 1960s, he wrote several of what Peter called “wonderful, erudite, funny, and occasionally scolding, hand-written letters done in fountain pen on small white stationery ...” In 1984, Ferguson told Cambridge’s Daily Reporter that Peter had been an “an excellent debater” who always enlivened a dull discussion.⁶⁸ Ferguson was still alive in December 1989 when Peter was in Cambridge to sign copies of his latest Morningside Papers. At that time Ferguson told a reporter with the Cambridge Times that Peter had been “one of the most interesting students,” full of ideas and arguments, and “bent on keeping things stirred up. He was outgoing, bright and friendly, interested in sports, interested in politics, interested in darn-near everything.”⁶⁹

Too often Peter suppressed happy memories. He even admitted as much concerning his period in Galt. “Under the scar tissue of the memories I’ve tried to shut out are happy times,” he wrote near the end of his life.⁷⁰ Throughout his life, happiness was often snuffed out by unhappy memories, as if he preferred it that way.

Ernest Hemingway once told John Dos Passos that an unhappy childhood was often a precursor to a writing career. In the preface to The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant, Gallant notes that the impulse to write, and the stubbornness to keep going, may be due to “some drastic shaking up, early in life.” In Peter’s early life, there was much shaking up, real and imaginary. To the normal insecurities of childhood were added unstable adult relationships, shifting domestic arrangements, adjustments from big city to small town, and the curse of acne: in other words, the very sort of instability that, according to Gallant, “unbolts the door between perception and imagination and leaves it ajar for life.” Childhood flux, Gallant adds, often fuses “memory and language and waking dreams.”

The novelist John Le Carré explains creativity in a slightly different manner. Le Carré’s father was, like Harold Gzowski, charismatic and unreliable. “If you’ve been brought up in that anarchic situation by a maverick dad,” LeCarré once mused, “as a boy it deprives you of your self-pride, it makes you conspire in your mind about getting even with society.” LeCarré chose to get even by using his imagination.⁷¹ So did Peter, it would seem.

In August 1968, in his hurried, almost illegible, handwriting, Peter quoted the novelist Jean Rhys: “If you want to write the truth, you must write about yourself.” To underscore the absolute necessity of being true to oneself, he underlined must.⁷² Two decades later, in his memoirs, he argued that “the only honest writing anyone can do is about himself.” If the child is father of the man, then it was almost inevitable that the man who grew out of that highly imaginative childhood in Galt would be creative, curious, and constantly in need of encouragement from friends, colleagues, and lovers as well as from brandy, Scotch, and Winchester cigarettes.