My father was born in a tiny village in the heart of County Tyrone about sixty miles west of Belfast. When my siblings and I were young, he talked incessantly of Tullyhogue (it means “the hill of the young men” and at one time the kings of Ulster, the O’Neills, were crowned there), and when I first visited it as a child I saw why. It’s even today a kind of storybook place. The hill, called Fort Hill by the locals because of the ancient earthworks of a fortification going back to prehistoric days, affords a view of lush green countryside for miles around, and the gleaming waters of Lough Neigh off to the east. At the edge of the village the Tullywiggan River descends swiftly to join the larger Balinderry River, a prime trout and salmon stream flowing into Lough Neigh and from there on to the North Sea. Where the two join, at the foot of Fort Hill, there is a small castle with crenellated towers called Killymoon. In a nearby estate there still stands the rural retreat of Dean Jonathan Swift of Gulliver’s Travels fame, who used it on his summer vacations when writing. It overlooks the rapids of the Tullywiggan, and the sound of the falling water never ends. I couldn’t know on that first brief visit what a part Tullyhogue would play in my later life and how I would grow to love it almost as much as my father did.
My paternal grandfather, Thomas William Harpur, whose full name I was given, was a blacksmith and postmaster by vocation. But his avocation was leading and teaching flute bands throughout the towns and villages of the county and beyond. He was a great reader, though it’s difficult to fathom how he found time for it. Books were scarce, but he made great friends with the local Church of Ireland minister and often disappeared up the lane behind his house to call on the rectory and borrow items from the library there. I still remember him in his smithy, hammering at a glowing horseshoe on a huge anvil, plunging it with fierce hissing into the water, and then allowing me to ply the bellows for him as he thrust the shoe back into the fire. He gave me a wonderful penknife and then taught me how to make a passable pocket flute with it from a willow branch.
When I next visited Tullyhogue as a young man of twenty-two, he and Grandma Harpur had both gone to join their forebears in the walled, circular cemetery in a field beyond the village and close to the ancient church. The burial ground is called Donnarisk and whenever I recall it I remember the priory well a few yards outside its perimeter. It has iron caging around it to keep out the cattle, and when you stoop and look into it you can see the grains of white sand at the bottom boiling as the spring bubbles up. That sight fascinated me as a small boy and has somehow reassured me ever since whenever I have had the privilege of going back. It has always been an archetypal image for me of “living water” and of the life of the Spirit in each of us.
Both my parents left school early. My father joined the police in Belfast and my mother worked as a sales clerk in a downtown millinery store. Just before they met—at a fair, near a ride called the roundabouts—a pivotal event occurred that was to have a great impact not just on their lives but later on those of myself and my brother and two sisters. A then-famous British evangelist by the name of Billy Nicholson came to Belfast for a week-long crusade. He was a somewhat rough, plainspoken man—more like Billy Sunday, another well-known preacher of the period, than Billy Graham in our own day. The meetings were packed and Nicholson was able to evoke such a “conviction of sin” and other emotions that local papers reported how Belfast’s main employer, the great shipbuilding works of Harland and Wolff (who crafted the Titanic), didn’t know what to do with all the stolen tools that workers who had been “saved” were returning!
My parents attended the mass rallies independently, and though both had been raised in a church context from childhood, they went forward at the altar call to “give their hearts and lives to the Lord.” It was a commitment to an all-embracing, fervent evangelicalism that was to last a lifetime. But more of that later.
Both were very young to be dating, given the mores of the time in Ireland, and when my father appeared on a motorcycle to whisk his youngest daughter away on what seemed like a “casual pinion,” Grandpa David Hoey was less than pleased, to put it mildly. There were the usual rows common to this atavistic struggle between love on the one hand and parental caution and control on the other. When my father finally wrote him a formal note asking permission to marry Betty, Grandpa Hoey relaxed a little and gave cautious consent in a letter that my sisters still cherish.
My father, having grown disillusioned by police work, soon afterwards announced that he was going to emigrate to Canada in search of a better future than strife-torn Northern Ireland seemed likely to offer. He already had an older brother who was living and working in Toronto, and the plan was that my father would live with him, get a job and then be joined by my mother a year later. A few days after his arrival, although work was scarce in Toronto in the late 1920s, he was hired by a prominent wholesale paper firm, Buntin and Reid (today a part of the Domtar empire), to sweep floors. With an energy and determination that marked him all his life, he made a rapid advancement, and it was not long before he became foreman over the entire warehouse on Peter Street, not far from where the SkyDome (Rogers Centre) and CN Tower now stand, and where he would work through the Great Depression and eventually become a traveller for the company.
Though it saddened her family, my mother, a shy and somewhat anxious person by nature, kept to her resolve to join Billy, as she called him, in Canada. Her father feared—or perhaps even hoped— she would change her mind when she met her husband-to-be after the long absence. Accordingly, he insisted on sewing the money for her return passage into the lining of one of her dresses (it eventually helped pay for some furniture). The ship, the Cunarder SS Athenia, left Belfast Lough on April 14, 1928. The ocean voyage, which in those days took from nine or ten days to a fortnight, was not pleasant. My mother, who all her life could grow queasy at the mere mention of boat travel or even a swing, was wretchedly seasick for most of the time.
My father met the boat in Montreal and on April 25, 1928, a day after arriving in Toronto, they were married in historic St. Peter’s Anglican Church at the corner of Bleecker and Carlton streets. It was and remained for many years one of the bastions of Low Church, evangelical Anglicanism in the city. Only two witnesses were present and there was no honeymoon in any modern sense of the term. I was born the next year, the year the stock market crash echoed around the world. My sister Elizabeth arrived seventeen months after my birth, my brother George was born a full ten years later, in 1939, just after World War II had begun, and my sister Jane was born in 1943. Another baby brother, Robert, was born in 1950 but lived only a few days.
My parents lived for a couple of years in the flat my father had at his brother’s home at 13 Badgerow Avenue, not far from the old Don Jail and Riverdale Zoo. I was born shortly after midnight on Sunday, April 14, 1929, in a small private clinic a few blocks away, on Victor Avenue. The next year, expecting another child, my parents moved to a rented house just south of Queen Street and east of Broadview Avenue. My mother used to push me in a large, old-style pram along Queen Street to meet “Billy” when he came home from work by streetcar every night. There was very little money, but in 1930 anybody with a steady job was among the truly fortunate. One night a short time later, while out for a walk after supper, again with the pram, they met a man they recognized from “over home.” They talked and it turned out he had a house for sale on Lawlor Avenue, which was a little farther east, running north off Kingston Road in a district known today as the Upper Beaches. A deal was struck, my parents came up with $200 for the down payment, and they moved once more. The full price of the house at 164 Lawlor Avenue was $4,000. In all, we lived in three different houses on the same street over a span of more than twenty years. In 1949, I left home to live in residence at the University of Toronto, and finally for good in 1951, on my way to Oxford.
Looking back, I realize what an extraordinarily rich experience it was growing up in Toronto’s old east end in what was essentially a working-class neighbourhood before, during and after World War II. The public school, of institutional brick, with a cinder playing ground, was named after Sir Adam Beck, the original architect of the Ontario hydroelectricity system. It lay at midpoint on Lawlor between Kingston Road to the south and Gerrard Street to the north. On Kingston Road there were innumerable small shops, much like an English village, a cinema or “show”—which my sister and I were forbidden to enter—and a large United church.