My wife, Anne, was speaking to Brady just prior to his heading out for work when he had the heart attack in his apartment. They were discussing his holidays, which were coming up in the next few weeks, and his visa application form for entry into Syria at a time when the newspapers were reporting numerous deaths each day due to the conflict there. A conflict in a country never phased Brady.
He was then planning to go on to Lebanon. Not London … Lebanon.
When you read this book, you will find how special Brady was. He was the bravest person I ever met. I will miss him terribly.
Boy from Nowhere is not only dedicated to my five grandchildren but to my son, Brady.
1
Hello, World
I never knew my father. He died when I was two. I have been amused all my life by the accusation — my mother was the strongest person I have ever encountered and I had two older sisters — that I prefer the company of females to the male species. I find most men dull.
I am a Saskatchewan boy. I was born in Rouleau Hospital at the height of the Depression on August 31, 1932. Rouleau (later the site of TV’s Corner Gas) was the closest town with a hospital. Hearne, where my family lived, is fifty miles south of Regina. People from Hearne are called “Hearnias.” In fact, the town was so small it couldn’t afford a village idiot. Everyone had to take turns.
The population of Hearne was twenty-six: one street, one general store, one blacksmith shop, a church, and two grain elevators. As with most of rural Saskatchewan, there was no running water, no electricity. The name comes with appropriate heritage — named after Sir Samuel Hearne, who joined the Royal Navy as a captain’s batman at age eleven and was knighted after becoming the first European explorer to reach the Arctic overland, and then spent his final days in a Paris prison.
My mother, Edna, was one of eleven children of the Clarke farm family. She had seven brothers (Dick, Jim, Dale, Harvey, Jack, Les, and Lloyd) and three sisters (Dora, Ruby, and Irene). Having married young at nineteen, something everyone tended to do on the Prairies during the Depression, Edna had four children in five years. I was the third in line, first son.
On the day of my birth, three of her seven brothers set out in a truck to drive her the seventeen miles to Rouleau. There hadn’t been any rain on the Prairies for three years. It was as dry as a bone. The ground was like icing sugar. When it finally did rain, it was like chocolate fudge. They called it “gumbo mud.” Needless to say, it rained the night of the truck ride. A mickey of rye accompanied the three soon-to-be uncles on the trip. It was tough going.
The truck went into the ditch four times because of the gumbo, while my mother was moaning in the back. And then it happened. The sky went completely black. It was a total eclipse of the sun. They didn’t know what to make of it but carried on, eventually getting to the hospital.
Once I came into the world, the brothers crept into my mother’s hospital room and asked what she was going to name me. “Murray Allan,” she replied.
“Shucks,” said Uncle Jack, “we were hoping you were going to call him ‘Gumbo Eclipse.’” (In later life I thought that would have made a great byline in the New York Times: “By Gumbo Eclipse Fotheringham.”)
I heard the story of my birth many times from my mother. I always thought that with time the story became exaggerated. However, many decades later, a girlfriend of mine, Marilyn Freer, gave me a very special gift — a leather-bound copy of the New York Times on the day I was born. There on the front page was the story and a map about the total eclipse of the sun that occurred across the continent, including that gumbo road to Rouleau. I apologized to my mother for ever doubting her story. In retrospect it all seemed fitting.
With my siblings Donna, Irene, and Jack in front of our home in Hearne, Saskatchewan. I have on the long pants and the funny hat.
I was named after James Allan, my great-grandfather. Here is his story.
In 1845, James Allan, seventeen years old, and his younger brother, William Allan, aged fifteen, lived as orphans with an aunt and uncle in Antrim, Ireland. They suffered a miserable existence that prompted them to run away to the Port of Belfast. Somehow they managed to board a sailing ship and hide themselves as stowaways.
The uncle discovered their departure and traced their disappearance to the sailing ship. Along with the captain, he searched the vessel and apprehended William, the younger brother. James Allan wasn’t found, and thus sailed away as a stowaway, arriving in Canada penniless and homeless.
This was the parting of the two Allan brothers.
A history tells us that they did eventually establish a correspondence by mail, but it had been neglected in the later days of their lives.
Great-Grandfather James Allan started a career in the lumber trades. First, he hauled logs by oxen, then eventually he had his own sawmill powered by steam. James Allan died in 1905, spending his last years living in Ontario among his family of seven children. He was buried in a cemetery in Shelburne, Ontario.
William, the younger brother, spent his career in the British military, serving in many parts of the world, including the newly developing territory of Canada. Despite his diligent inquiries and search for his brother, James, they were never together again. On the death of Great-Grandfather James Allan, a chance contact was made by his offspring to their Uncle William. He was then brought to Canada from England and lived out his remaining years with the children of his brother.
Upon his death in 1911, William was buried in the same plot with his brother in the cemetery in Shelburne. Finally, the Allan brothers were together again after sixty-five years. (A coincidence of life is that three generations later, my son, Kip, is in the timber business.)
My mother was three weeks from her twenty-fourth birthday when I was born. Brother Jack came a year later. My father, John Scott, ran the local grocery store. I have been told by my aunts that he was a fine man and that he and my mother were madly in love. I don’t remember him; as mentioned earlier, he was rude enough to die when I was two. He died in my mother’s arms in Rouleau Hospital after a botched appendectomy. He was thirty-one.
His death shattered my mother’s life. Here she was, twenty-six, with four children under the age of five in the heart of the Prairies in the middle of the Depression. How could this tragedy happen to two people who were so happy with each other? It toughened her. It gave her an inner strength she never knew she had. In order to support the family, she took in washing. Because she had taken violin lessons in high school, she was able to give lessons for 50 cents an hour. Half the students couldn’t pay.
The post office needed someone to run it for the area. My mother took on the position and turned our house into the local mail stop for the farm families that surrounded the hamlet. Ottawa paid her $35 a month. With the help of her father who had the farm, she was able to get fresh vegetables and milk, and so we got by.
As a child, I was fascinated by what was placed in the small boxes in the post office. Mother filled these wickets from the kitchen side of our house. After she stuffed the wickets with the mail, I snuck out the magazines and flipped through them, making sure to put them back before the rightful owners came to collect them. On more than one occasion, I retrieved an atlas and put it on the floor, leafing through various continents, telling my mother that someday I would go to all of those places. And I have.
My parents’ wedding day in Saskatchewan — everyone in their Sunday best.
When it was time to go to school, my sisters, Donna and Irene, and my brother, Jack, and I travelled three miles to Amherst, a