HARTLEY FAWCETT fervently believed that he was a self-created man, and Rita Surry, just as passionately if not as loudly, molded herself and her life as the exception to every rule by which her family lived—or, in her view, ran amok. That made them both, like their own parents and immediate ancestors and unlike their siblings, pioneers. Pioneers are unrooted people, interested in acquiring property, making money, and building large families as a protection against old age and contingency. They are contemptuous of the past, oblivious to most cultural and historical nuance and indifferent toward anything other than practical understanding.
But my parents were a different sort of pioneer: less constrained by subsistence, and the frontier they sought was as much psychological as it was physical. They wanted to get ahead of other people, build solid material foundations for the future, and, most important of all, do things differently than their parents and siblings.
Pioneers are different from immigrants. My wife’s Eastern European parents, although born in North America, are typical of immigrants in that they are most interested in family and ethnic solidarity, educating their children and gaining social prestige. They have been obsessed by questions of obligation and social responsibility that held little interest for either of my parents.
Me? I’m Canadian, which is different again. I have a sensibility that includes elements of both pioneer and immigrant values, but has been shaped by the multicultural society around me. I’m trying hard, for instance, to infect my children with a sense of their genetic and social connectedness to both the people around them and to their ancestors, and I’d like them to have a deeper appreciation of the complexity of the present and past than I was brought up to observe. But like my parents before me, I have no ethnic chauvinisms, and I have their determination to do things my own way, their eye for practicalities, and I have their skeptical view of social convention: if everyone is doing it, that is cause for wariness.
Put another way, I want my children to understand the specific flavour of wild strawberries and I want them to know where to look for them. I want them to know how wild strawberries differ from the genetically modified and tasteless agribusiness strains, and in which ways—and when—the flavour of the local strawberries in season still resembles the wild ones.
Being Canadian this way, and with an almost infinitely better access to the specifics of the past provided by an information-enriched world, has convinced me that the people who raised me weren’t entirely self-created. Like most people, their family histories reveal more than a few things they couldn’t—or wouldn’t— have: the contrariness of their characters, why they got so far from home and from their families and the comforts offered. That’s why I’ve located the family closet, and have pried open its door. Out pour the skeletons—and the wild strawberries.
The wild strawberries I’ll pick and try to present with their flavour intact. The skeletons are another matter: they explain too many of the whys and whats to leave out, but they’re not the story, which is about two people who deliberately stepped outside the slow-moving continuums of history and genetics that made them. Thus, I’ve forced the skeletons back into the closet, and I’ve parked the closet at the end of the book, for the edification of those who want to open it.
How my parents first met isn’t a story that has survived in the form of a singular thrilling anecdote. Hartley Fawcett worked on the trucks for a meat-packing company and Rita Surry worked at the Hudson’s Bay Company, the largest meat and grocery outlet in Edmonton at the time, so it seems logical to suppose that she met him that way.
But maybe not. My mother once told me a wistful story about my father appearing at one of the dances she organized with her girlfriends. He’d been the date of an acquaintance, and she herself was there with a police constable she didn’t much fancy. She spotted my father the moment he walked in, and said that he spent the evening glancing at her. He was slim, handsome, and strongly built, with bright hazel eyes and a shock of jet-black hair. She said he had a reputation for wildness, but quickly added that what mattered to her was that he was a man with strength and ambition, and that his wildness could be tamed.
“He was a catch,” she said, ruefully. “But when you’re in love, you can’t really be sure of exactly what kind of fish you’re catching.”
Fred Surry, my mother’s father, ran across my father well before she did. Hartley Fawcett had shown up at the taxi stand next door to Fred’s book and coin shop to collect whatever he could of the thousand dollars he’d lent to one of the taxi owners, a burly pipe smoker in his late thirties. When the cabbie didn’t have the money he owed and showed no inclination to get and give it up, an argument ensued. Fred Surry heard the commotion, and arrived too late to catch the taxi owner taking the first swing at my father. But he was perfectly timed to see my father counter with a punch that put the larger man’s pipe through the side of his left cheek—and to then watch my father stand over him as he bled and threaten to do worse if he didn’t pay up, and soon.
The impression Fred Surry got from the incident was almost as inaccurate as it was dramatic. Hartley Fawcett was no thug and he wasn’t one to start fights. He just ended them, usually with a punch-line. What Fred had seen was a young man convinced of his cause— the latter trait would be a lifelong constant—and a counter-puncher able to back up his cause with a boxer’s right hand and a mouth to match.
That first impression was the only one Fred Surry was willing to entertain, and my father did nothing to alter it. When Fred found out his daughter was dating him, he tried to stop it, cornering my father when he brought her home at midnight from their first date.
“Just what do you think you’ve been doing with my daughter until this time of night?” he screeched.
“Out chasing chickens,” my father snapped back, likely sensing that he was doomed no matter what he said. “Be thankful I’ve brought her home at all.”
My mother kept dating him over her father’s objections. It isn’t clear if he kept her out all night before they were married, but there were tales about motorcycle rambles deep into the Alberta countryside, and others about sleeping in haystacks. There’s also a rumour that the two of them rode his big motorcycle to Vancouver and back. That hints at many things, not the least of which is that my mother’s youthful stamina and her zest for adventure weren’t so dif ferent from my father’s. In the early 1930s, Vancouver to Edmonton was a round trip of almost 3000 kilometres, and over roads too stony and bad to even think about.
When my parents married in August 1936, Fred Surry refused to attend the ceremony. He forbade my grandmother to go, too, but she went anyway, to hell with you. After that, he refused to be in the same room with his son-in-law and went so far as to disinherit my mother in a 1937 revision of his will. He called my father “the Indian”—it was unclear if he was referring to the motorcycle or his dark good looks—and predicted future moral and financial doom for his eldest daughter.
There’s no question that my parents were in love when they married, but there was a calculated element on both sides. It’s clear that to my father, Rita Surry was a “catch”: she was pretty if not quite beautiful; she was sensible and practical, and very organized and focused. She was better educated than he was, more cultured, and more socially adept. For her, he was a project, and of course, also a “catch”: handsome, strong, and ambitious, a man with the sort of inner drive that she sensed could be molded. My mother didn’t stray far from her common sense, even in matters of love. Romance was one thing, but as the saying goes, you gotta have something in the bank, Frank. She did not want to be poor the way her parents had been, and my father promised her that one day, she would ride in Cadillacs.
So