Fathers and Sons Read online

  He did so and after a long wait was shown into the deputy editor’s office. It was empty.

  Eventually a harassed-looking man in shirtsleeves and glasses hurried in. He shook hands with my father and offered him a cigarette.

  ‘Good trip over?’

  ‘Well, apart from the storms and some icebergs. That’s why I’m a bit late. I–’

  The other man waved expansively. ‘Sure, sure, these things happen. I had to sail to London last year for the paper and the same thing happened to me. Missed my story. Almost lost my job, ha ha!’

  There was an uncomfortable pause, and then the deputy took a deep breath and delivered the coup de grâce.

  ‘See here, Madeley, it’s like this. You’re a newspaperman, you know how it works. A deadline is a deadline. You missed yours–not your fault–and…well, I’m afraid the job’s gone to another guy. He’s been pestering all hell out of us and…well, he was around and you weren’t. Sorry. Nothing personal.’

  ‘I’m only three days late.’

  ‘Three days is something of an eternity on a daily, friend. Like I said, I’m sorry.’

  The interview was over and Chris found himself in an elevator going back down to the lobby. Half an hour before he thought he had a job and somewhere to live. Now he was literally out on the street.

  To his credit, he didn’t panic, though he felt horribly winded and humiliated. What would he tell his colleagues back home on the paper? Or his parents, come to that? Sacked before he’d even walked through the door.

  He went to a drugstore, bought every newspaper in the place, traded some of his dwindling dollars for dimes and settled in for a long haul at the payphone. He had to get a job.

  Perhaps a note of desperation had slipped into his voice, perhaps it was because he was calling from a public phone and had to keep inserting his coins as the pips sounded, but Chris received increasingly short shrift from the newspapers he dialled. He began to feel defeated even before he was put through to the editor, or more often, an assistant. After a while he hung up and went for a coffee. He wasn’t going to land a reporter’s job like this.

  But damn it, he needed to find some kind of employment, fast. And somewhere to live. He toyed briefly with the idea of calling one of several relatives who lived in Ontario to beg a bed for a few nights, but he felt too ashamed and embarrassed. He had to fix this on his own.

  He ended his first day in Toronto with the promise of a job selling men’s underwear in a downtown department store, and a month’s rent on a filthy bedsit across the city.

  Far from home and jobless, Chris spent the evening exploring downtown Toronto. He had never seen anything like it, but the teeming Canadian city was too much for him that night. Far from being energised by the sight of soaring buildings, enormous, flashy cars, and the sound of voices speaking in what to him sounded like an authentic American twang (he would learn to distinguish the difference), he was intimidated. It was too much to absorb after such a terrible start and he gave up and took a bus to his digs, feeling utterly defeated.

  Not exactly what he had come three and a half thousand miles for.

  Most of us can remember a run of particularly bad luck in our lives or careers, or both. Now, fortune resolutely refused to shine on my father. It was partly bad timing on his part. Thousands of Canadian servicemen were being demobbed every month and understandably they got first pick of the jobs in what was, after all, their own country. Several times he was convinced he had landed a position in some newsroom only to be told at the last minute that a local man had belatedly entered the frame and taken priority.

  It was the same in men’s underwear. After a few weeks Chris was quietly let go in favour of a local man just out of the army.

  Sometimes he took a bus into the tobacco country outside the city and earned a few dollars picking leaves in the harvest. He enjoyed this; it reminded him a little of home. It also reminded him that he couldn’t afford to buy cigarettes any more. He was economising on food, too; photographs of him at this time show my father to be disturbingly gaunt.

  But he was stranded. He had come to Canada optimistically on a one-way ticket, and going back home wasn’t an option. Years later he would ruefully say to me: ‘Never travel anywhere without your fare home in your back pocket. Not anywhere.’

  By the autumn of 1950, he was in an extremely tight spot. The tobacco harvest was over and he was flat broke, reduced to patrolling the sands of Lake Ontario with his Leica camera–a twenty-first birthday present from his parents–taking photos of children on donkey rides and hustling their parents to buy them at a dollar a shot. Most politely declined. There was one compensation; he was fascinated by the Great Lakes, giant freshwater expanses so wide that their opposite shores lay far below the horizon. They seemed more like oceans than lakes, and when the donkeys were resting he took wonderful seascapes with his Leica purely for his own pleasure.

  Then, out of the blue, his beach-bum existence threw him a break.

  It was a warm October afternoon and a large, prosperous family had gathered on the sands. The father was dressed in an immaculate tan suit, his pretty wife in a spreading dress cinched in tightly at the waist. Their children were in cool crisp cotton and a uniformed nanny and a chauffeur fussed in attendance. The glamorous party appeared to be waiting for someone to show up.

  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 coff
ee.

  ‘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.

  Chapter 7

  LAYING GHOSTS

  Chris 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.