We could never have loved the earth so well
if we had had no childhood in it.
GEORGE ELIOT, The Mill on the Floss
IN 1954 MY FATHER LEFT my mother and us four boys in Woolton and sailed off to the faraway land of Canada. The plan was that he would find work and save every penny toward buying a house to which we would all move in a year or so. Not everyone approved of the scheme. One of the teachers at our school voiced what others were likely thinking: that this was reckless foolhardiness on his part, that he was bound to fail as other dreamers had failed before him, and that he’d be back in no time with his grand dreams crushed and his tail between his legs.
But at home we entertained no doubts. As my mother wrote to my dad during their long separation: “the boys still go [to Mass] most days. They are all keeping well and talking of Canada and I get tired of their questions. They do try to be as good as they can. I am sure you will be very glad to see them all again . . .We shall be glad to get word from you to cross, we’ll lose no time in getting out of this place.” All my hopes and yearnings were of leaving grimy old Merseyside for the wild excitement of what people still called the New World. The Canada I dreamed of moving to was a vast land of forested wilderness. Television helped stoke the fantasy. One of our favorite shows on the BBC at that time was called The Cabin in the Clearing, in which a pioneer couple and their brave daughter, Alice, were repeatedly menaced by wild animals and besieged in their isolated log cabin by murderous Shawnee Indians. I fantasized being with them in the wilderness, protecting pretty Alice from the perils that beset her. One evening, after much pleading, our mother allowed us kids to stay up past our normal bedtime to watch a TV special featuring “the singing rage Miss Patti Page.” Fetchingly dressed in a buckskin outfit, perfectly pert and blond and American, she seemed to me the most beautiful woman imaginable singing the most heartrending songs I’d ever heard. And she lived across the ocean, in the land where our father already was and we would soon be.
Finally, in early 1955, a letter arrived with the joyous news we’d awaited so long—our dad had bought a house! He enclosed several small black and white snapshots of what looked to us like an imposing wooden home on a considerable estate. As my mother had promised, we lost no time in disposing of our possessions and preparing to leave in the first week of May, even though this meant abandoning school before our terms were completed. The mid-fifties were the final days when transatlantic liners still were a cheaper alternative to airline travel, so we would take a boat to Canada. Berthed at the Liverpool docks, the Cunard Line ship seemed to me a truly magnificent ocean liner. My earlier fears over boarding the Mersey ferry were long gone, and as the great vessel was pulled away from the wharf and made its way out into the Irish Sea I was filled with a thrilling sense of adventure. As twilight descended, my brothers and I stood at the stern of the boat and watched the twinkling lights of Liverpool slowly fade and vanish into the darkness. We were leaving once and for all; the past was behind us and ahead lay unimagined possibilities.
Everything was changed on that voyage. There was no Mass to attend in the morning, or any school all day. We ate our meals in a plush dining room, served by an acerbic waiter. Not long into the voyage, our mother succumbed to seasickness that confined her to her bunk. We kids were free to roam, make pals with other kids, and get into whatever mischief offered itself, mostly by poking around areas of the ship we were not supposed to enter. Though our mum tried her best to maintain some discipline, we were experiencing a freedom we’d never known before, unhampered by any realization of how temporary a state of affairs this was. The latter part of the voyage involved much watching for icebergs and a collective anxiety that we not suffer the same fate as the Titanic.
Then the great excitement of first sighting land. We gathered at the railings and made out on the far horizon a low gray smudge. Cruising up the Saint Lawrence River offered a stunning validation of all my expectations. Forests and farms stretched away from either shore. Wooded hillsides rose beyond. Kids paddled out in canoes to wave greetings to us and ride the wake of our great ship’s passing. What a brilliant, wild, wide-open place we’d arrived at!
We disembarked at Montreal and took a train to Toronto. Again, I thrilled to mile after mile of woodlands, farms, lakes, and rivers. We pulled into Union Station in Toronto and wandered together into the waiting crowd. Suddenly a man burst forward and clasped us all in his arms. It was our dad, though he seemed almost a stranger, it had been so long since we’d seen him.
When we got to our new home it was in fact not a country estate, and certainly no cabin in a clearing, but a modest little two-story clapboard house on a city lot in the town of Weston on the outskirts of Toronto. But, wonder of wonders, there were trees growing on the lot, our very own trees—a row of scraggly evergreens out front and several big shade trees in the backyard. The whole neighborhood seemed dominated by enormous spreading trees. Although we were in a new country, with neither relatives nor friends, this appeared to me a far more green and pleasant land than the dreary treeless streets of Woolton Village we’d left behind. Paradoxically, our emigration seemed to me more coming home than exile. Of course, at nine years of age, admiring the few scrawny trees growing around our new home, I had no real idea of what might lie ahead of me. But I think I did have some nascent sense of having answered the call of trees, that the long journey we had just completed had taken me partway toward a destination I did not yet understand.
IT WAS MID-MAY of 1955 when our transplanted family finally got settled in Weston. The school year had little more than a month remaining, but Ger, Brendan, and I were enrolled straightaway at Saint John the Evangelist Catholic School, operated by an order of nuns called the Faithful Companions of Jesus. I think there was some initial confusion as to how our English standards fit with Canadian grades, but I ended up in the grade 4 class under the tutelage of a dour lay teacher named Mrs. Kavanagh. As far as the grade 4 class was concerned, I was the new kid, an immigrant who talked funny and had peculiar red hair. A “limey.” (My mother explained that calling us limeys only served to expose the ignorance of those using the term: the applicable pejorative for a Liverpudlian would be “Scouser,” from our distinctive dialect called “scouse.”) Almost straightaway, we had a little class field day of sorts and in the feature event, the less-than-a-hundred-yard dash across the playground, I finished in a dead heat for first with a startled Wally Somebody who was the most gifted athlete in the class. Few accomplishments could have more effectively established my credentials. In my eagerness to fit in, I quickly adopted whatever local slang I could, which may have won favor with my classmates but certainly didn’t with Mrs. Kavanagh. Twice I was held in after school and compelled to write on the blackboard fifty times, on one occasion “Geez is not a word” and on another “Ain’t is not a word.”
But I had not fallen from grace; far from it. In fact our churchgoing intensified. The school and adjacent church were about a mile from our house, a pleasant walk along tree-lined streets. My brothers and I would walk to Mass every morning before school, though hardly any other kids did this. We couldn’t receive Holy Communion, because we’d eaten breakfast before setting out, but on Saturdays we’d walk to Mass in the morning, when we could take Communion, then back home for breakfast, and return to church for confession in the afternoon. On Sundays my father would drive the family to Mass in the morning and some of us boys would walk back to church for Benediction on Sunday evening. There’d be lots of kids at Sunday Mass, since it was a mortal sin to miss it, but none at Benediction—they’d all be at home watching Walt Disney on TV while we’d kneel in the deserted church with a few old ladies groaning away at turgid hymns like “Tantum Ergo Sacramentum.”
We