Many attacks her defenders stood,
Fighting on though smeared with blood.
Sentries no longer pace the walls,
Nor knights and earls feast in the halls.
Now this fortress lies in ruins,
Stone arches now a cave for bruins;
Surrounded by an empty moat,
Now the pasture for a goat,
The castle, all her glory taken,
Lies empty, quiet and forsaken.
I find it funny that my start in a writing career was on a romantic theme and that I am now regarded as a cynic due to my satiric approach to politics and politicians. I also find it interesting that sixty-one years later my lovely seven-year-old granddaughter, Quinn, wrote her first short story on a romantic theme (set in a castle) and at age ten won the opportunity to have one of her poems published in a book in which the poetry was chosen from across the nation. Subsequently, my other beautiful granddaughter, Lauren, has published both her poetry and a short story.
At the end of grade six we took the school bus to Chilliwack Junior High, three miles away. On the first day, when we went into woodwork class, our teacher showed us a T-square. He said, “This is the most precious tool you will ever have and you must take care of it and never abuse it.”
He left the class for a minute, so I took my T-square and pretended to beat it on my desk like a sledgehammer. I then felt this large, very large hand on my neck. He had found the class smartass and was going to kill me.
We then had a small gym for basketball, and I was very good at this as I had learned it at Sardis Elementary. (They had had a rough little outdoor court.) One day I got into a fight with another kid on the court. The principal asked the two of us to report to the gym at noon hour. He had two pairs of boxing gloves. He gave them to us and told us to put them on. He said, “You two are such smartasses, you have one hour to pummel each other.” He wouldn’t allow anyone else in but sat there and watched us for an hour. Many times we asked if we could stop. He would say, “Nope, you have forty minutes left.” After the hour, we were absolutely exhausted. We could hardly stand up. I think we learned our lesson.
After junior high school, we went to Chilliwack Senior High, which had grades nine to thirteen. The last grade was called Senior Matric (senior matriculation) in those days. While in my first year, I carried on with my woodwork classes. And lo and behold, my teacher was a man named Laurence Peter, who was famed for his wild temper. One day while we class cut-ups, bored as usual, were stuffing sawdust in the ear of the class wimp, Peter was so enraged that he hurled a chisel at one kid and cut him over an eyebrow.
Years later, while working at the Vancouver Sun, I read a one-page piece in Esquire introducing to the world “The Peter Principle: everyone in any organization gets promoted one level above their level of competence.” I ripped it out and pinned it on the Sun notice board where within minutes all of the reporters were laughing their heads off because it described, exactly, our newsroom. The Sun had taken the top reporter and made him city editor where he was a disaster. The former city editor was made the managing editor, even though he was completely incompetent.
I asked my researcher to find out who this genius Laurence Peter was. She came back three days later and said he was in charge of the University of Southern California’s department studying handicapped children. She had traced his previous career from Western Washington College to the University of British Columbia to Chilliwack Senior High School. I almost fainted. This was my woodwork teacher. I tracked him down, we became good friends and dined together, and he told me he had devised his now-famous theory while at UBC when he discovered “that the reason academic politics were so vicious was because the stakes were so small.”
In the Depression days, when of course there was no TV and no movies within miles of our home, my mother and her siblings had to make their own entertainment. So they taught themselves how to play the banjo and piano, and someone always had a trumpet or saxophone. When my mother had four children of her own, she insisted that we all learn to play a musical instrument. I had listened painfully for years to my two older sisters taking piano lessons: Do-rey-me, do-rey-me. When it came my turn, I said, “No way am I going near that [hated] piano.”
“Well,” my mother said, “you’ve got to play something.”
I had seen an ad somewhere for guitar lessons. So I signed up for $45. On the day of my first lesson, my younger brother, Jack, and I were on the back of a flatbed truck, helping out as we often did the manager of the local feed store delivering sacks of whatever to the local farms. Jack and I never did get along, so we got into a fight and he pushed me off the truck. Unfortunately, it was travelling more than forty miles per hour, and I landed in the ditch with a broken wrist. That was the end of my musical career, and you must understand this is why Elvis Presley hit the charts because this obviously was years before he was invented.
To this day, I cannot play a note, sing a note, or blow a note. But, boy, can I dance. (Ask the girls.) I regret this inability to play an instrument when I go back to Saskatchewan and the Clarke family gets together for a good old-fashioned noisy romp. I do enjoy these evenings as much as I do going to my publishing buddy Kim McArthur’s Christmas parties in Toronto where again every member of her family — grandparents, parents, and kids — play a musical instrument and we get together around the piano where her father, The Colonel, used to play sax as backup.
My first summer job was grafting roses in a nursery for 45 cents an hour. My next job was being a cherry picker, weekends and summers, for 5 cents a pound around the time there was a Chilliwack Annual Cherry Festival. I worked in a frozen food factory where my job was to spread peas over huge wire pads. I also worked in another frozen food place where we carried sides of beef off boxcars and there was practically one worker per week taken to hospital with a broken foot because a forty-pound salmon, frozen stiff, was like dropping a bowling ball on your pinkie. I worked in the Sardis post office during Christmas holidays licking stamps and sorting mail, and I now know the names of every small town in Saskatchewan and Manitoba where the mail was headed.
I also tried to get into the high wages of the logging industry and went to the Silver Skagit logging camp near Hope, British Columbia. I had to buy a pair of caulk logging boots, with special spikes in the soles, for $50. I was sixteen years old, and there was no training. I just showed up. On my second day I found myself, as “high loader,” far up on a sixteen-wheel logging truck while a huge crane dropped swinging ten-foot-thick tree trunks so as not to crush me by coming down on my head. I lasted two days and didn’t even make enough to pay for my boots. Besides, I was a coward. The B.C. logging industry has the highest number of fatalities per capita of any industry in Canada.
For the school paper I was writing a column called “High School Highlights.” Les Barber, editor/owner of the weekly Chilliwack Progress, saw it and asked me to do a column for his paper. I took it down to him, and he later said he was astonished because he didn’t have to change a single word. I was writing these things, of course, in longhand. Les paid me for a weekly column, and it suddenly occurred to me that I should learn to type.
In grade twelve I enrolled in a typing class, which was composed of thirty grade nine girls. I was the only boy, and the whole basketball team fell down laughing and ribbed me forever. So while the guitar lessons didn’t work, the typing lessons certainly did. Obviously, I didn’t know then that it would set me off in a career in journalism.
I wrote a column about a student experiment that involved feeding rats — in school corridor cages — Coke and junk food. We all know the resulting conclusions. A stiff-necked Coca-Cola lawyer threatened to sue for patent violation. (I was in high school, for Christ’s sake!)
My major achievement was at the end of the year — the election of the boys’ Senior Ring to head the student council. It was the “big swinging dick” of the school, and you had to have a B+ average. So my fellow jock friends couldn’t go for it. They said I was a cinch. The day of the speech, which was outdoors on the grass, the whole school came out. At least half the