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