Babs was devoted to her older sister and heartily disliked her brother-in-law, Wes. She was family-proud and perhaps thought her sister was marrying below her station — marrying a man whose grandfather had been a servant to gentlemen like her father and grandfather. Or maybe she resented losing her beloved sister. Years later when my mother died, having named my father and Babs as executors, this rift created real problems. Wes finally won his way by threatening never again to allow Babs to see we three children, her nephews and niece. Pretty rough stuff. But Babs was eccentric, possibly with a lesbian inclination. She smoked Woodbines, the working man’s cigarette, had a hairy face, and dressed in what were in her time mannish clothes, often a suede golfing jacket, slacks or a heavy tweed skirt, and flat shoes. Although well off, she rented part of her small house near the sea front at Weston and shopped in cheap stores. But she fed we children handsomely when we visited. I remember as a small boy having a whole can of sardines for tea; when we went home and my father met us at the train station my short pants were so tight on my thighs that he drove me straight to the tailor who cut them off with a long pair of scissors.
Babs eventually married a retired sea captain but they never lived together, sometimes meeting on the sea front for a walk. I put this arrangement down to her eccentricity until I saw my grandmother’s will. As explained above, she had forfeited to her children her husband’s fortune when she remarried, so she had not much to leave her children anyway. But she provided that Babs would enjoy the income from the small estate until she married, when the capital would be divided among three of her four children, Will having taken his share in advance when he emigrated. What that meant, of course, was that George and my mother could receive nothing until Babs married, so I assume Babs’ marriage to the captain was strictly one of convenience, a generous gesture to release a little money to siblings.
When Babs fell ill, apparently because she was starving herself on some mad diet, she hired a nurse to look after her. Then the nurse fell ill and Babs looked after her. The two ladies lived together for years, but whether there was more to the relationship than friendship I cannot say. Not surprisingly, Babs doted on her sister’s firstborn, my brother John. I thought I was at least acceptable as a nephew until she died in 1968. She had lived all her life on inherited money, but still managed to leave about £65,000 after death duties, perhaps $1.5 million today. My sister got the house in Weston with the contents, some of which were antiques which went to auction in London, and my brother got most of the money. I got £100 because — according to what Babs told my sister — I had not been sufficiently attentive. Well, I have already admitted that I lacked social graces, but I did not know it was going to be that expensive.
My mother had inherited the same small fortune as Babs but when she died at age forty-two she left only a few thousand pounds, including the family home. Like her brother George in Canada, she liked to go horse racing, which no doubt accounted for some of her lost capital. But she also lost money in a famous financial scandal. A promoter and public figure named Clarence Hatry went to jail for fourteen years in 1930 when he admitted forgery, causing thousands of investors to lose large sums. But my mother at least learned her lesson. Having inherited early herself and not made good use of her money, she provided in her will that her children should not inherit until each reached the serious age of twenty-five. I was twenty-five in 1951, and had been married for a year. My share of what was left of her share of the Smedley/Woodroffe money was no fortune, but it enabled us to furnish an apartment and then to make a down payment on a house, a leg-up just when we needed it and the foundation on which we have built whatever security we enjoy today. So I have no right to complain.
So there you have the gene pool from which I emerged, and which helped to shape the journalist I became. I like to think I owe most to solid, striving, respectable Westells, working their way up in the world. But as my career will show, I can make reckless, almost irresponsible, decisions, and the reader may easily find some of my ideas eccentric, all of which I probably owe to the Woodroffes.
~ Chapter 2 ~
Growing Up in the Old World
Shortly after the end of the First World War, my father got a job as an insurance agent and inspector in Exeter, the capital city of the county of Devon in the rural southwest — one county up from Land’s End. My brother, Woodroffe John, was born there in 1921,1 in 1926, and my sister, Diana Wescombe, in 1930. I grew up in that old city and it was part of my nurture. It has a city wall, part of which was built by the Romans, a Norman castle built by William the Conqueror, and a Gothic cathedral built by generations of craftsmen on the site of an earlier Anglo-Saxon church. Translated from Latin, the inscription under the cathedral clock warns, “The hours perish and are reckoned to our account.” More cheerfully, it is said also to be the clock in the nursery rhyme:
Hickory dickory dock
The mouse ran up the clock;
The clock struck one
and down he run
Hickory, dickory dock!
John Graves Simcoe, first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, attended school in Exeter, and died in a house in the ancient Close surrounding the cathedral. Exeter’s Guildhall, where the city council met, is Tudor, as is Mol’s Coffee House in the cathedral Close, and the nearby Ship Inn where Elizabethan sea captains swaggered with bags of Spanish gold. Sir Francis Drake, greatest of the Elizabethan exploring adventurers, is supposed to have said that after his own ship he most liked the Ship Inn in Exeter. The city sent three ships down the River Exe to fight the Spanish Armada, and Queen Elizabeth rewarded it with its motto, Semper Fidelis, or Ever Faithful.
Among numerous churches there is St. Olave’s, thought to have been originally the house chapel of Gytha, Countess of Wessex, sister-in-law of King Canute who sat on his throne on the beach and ordered the tide not to rise. Was he really trying to command the tide, or was he demonstrating to his sycophantic courtiers the limits of his power? I prefer the latter version. Gytha was also the mother of King Harold, the last Anglo-Saxon King, who died with a Norman arrow in his eye at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. The Norman conqueror, William, handed Gytha’s chapel over to French monks, and built his red sandstone castle on a hill in the city. Naturally, he called it Rougemont, now also the name of a hotel. I can’t say that as a child or even as a young man I was much interested in the city’s history; familiarity bred not contempt but indifference. But growing up in such an environment must surely have influenced how I came to view time and change. The past was everywhere. By contrast, in most Canadian cities everything is new, or soon will be. Attention is focused on the future rather than on the past, on mastering change rather than accepting and enduring it. (I exclude from this sweeping generalization the Aboriginal and Québécois peoples who are steeped in folk history. Perhaps that is why the rest of Canada has so much trouble understanding and coming to terms with them.) Arriving in Canada when I was thirty, I was excited by the newness of the country, even if the cities were drab and the suburbs appallingly raw. But with roots in the Old World, I probably don’t think about time and change in quite the same way as someone raised in Toronto or Vancouver. Europeans have been in North America for about four hundred years, which might seem to guarantee permanency unless you have grown up with the fact that the Romans remained in Exeter, which they called Isca, for about four hundred years, then marched away never to be seen there again.
When I was born my stomach was not fully developed, which meant spending a few months on a diet, preferably in a mild climate, and this led me to another and vastly important part of the physical environment in which I grew up. The kindly doctor’s first idea was that mother