Eastern Passage

by Farley Mowat

  Although my earlier experience with this magazine had not led me to regard it with much affection, I made myself available to be interviewed by the man hired to write the piece. My wife and I invited him to our home (where he shared our hospitality without giving any intimation that he carried a knife under his shirt). I also arranged for him to have extensive access to the Farley Mowat archives at McMaster University.

  Stupidly, I did not realize anything was amiss until Saturday Night wanted a portrait taken of me. This resulted in a most peculiar photographic session in an abandoned Toronto warehouse where I was costumed, posed, and lighted as if for a portrait of Dracula. Even then (although I now had an uneasy feeling about the whole affair) I did not realize I had been set up until the May issue of the magazine appeared, with me on its cover wearing a sinister expression and an enormous Pinocchio nose.

  There was worse inside.

  The “profile” turned out to be a character assassination constructed largely from the canards the Hudson’s Bay Company, Porsild and various government officials, and others had spread about me during the imbroglio over People of the Deer. The intent of the piece was now crystal clear – it was meant to bury me.

  Some of my partisans thought I should sue, but others who had crossed swords with Conrad Black’s empire (and who had the scars to prove it) persuaded me that suing him or his minions would be a feckless enterprise unless I possessed his seemingly bottomless pockets.

  In the end, it hardly mattered. Whyte’s venture into yellow journalism proved of small benefit to the magazine. Quite the opposite. Within a few years, Saturday Night itself was dead and buried … some called it suicide.

  * No Man’s River, published in 2004 by Key Porter Books, Toronto, eventually came from this journal.

  * The official verbatim record of the House of Commons, vol. 96, no. 31, Tues. Jan. 19, p. 1243, etc.

  4

  SPREADING MY WINGS

  One splendid day in 1952, I was in the garden digging potatoes and trying to rid my mind of the turmoil induced by the People of the Deer affair, when a car drove up our long laneway and out of it clambered a man I had last seen eight years before on a battlefield in Italy.

  The Rev. Frederick Goforth, wartime chaplain with the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment, had sought me out with a job proposal.

  “I’ve not come to yarn about old times, Squib [my army nickname], though I don’t doubt we’ll get around to that. Fact is, you’ve made such a bang with your Eskimo book that the Regimental Association, of which I’m chairman, would like you to have a go at writing the story of the Hasty Ps. Stories, I guess, because nearly four thousand good men served with us during the late, unholy bloodbath.

  “Most, like you and me, made it home, though as you well know a good many came back shot full of holes. And a good many more joined the White Battalion over there and are never coming back.

  “We’d like you to tell their story so, just maybe, they won’t be forgotten with the rest, as the poem says.”

  Freddy Goforth had caught me off guard but I was not unreceptive. For a long time I had been considering a book based on my wartime experiences and had even written Dudley Cloud and Max Wilkinson to see how they felt about it.

  They had not been favourably inclined then, but after Freddy’s visit I wrote them again.

  My old army outfit wants me to write its history in World War II and say they’ll pony up $3,000.00 expense money if I’ll have a go. It might provide a God-given opportunity for me to soak up material and atmosphere that would be invaluable for the war novel I’ve had in mind. What say you now?

  Max replied with a kindly but adamantine rejection.

  I don’t doubt you’d write a powerful book but the market down here is sinking under a flood of war books and one more, especially by a Canuck, would go down like a lead balloon. Forget it, laddie!

  Dudley took his time replying but, when he did, was equally negative.

  There may be a market for such a book in Canada. There would be none in this country where most folk probably don’t even know Canadians were in the war unless it was as cannon fodder for the British. I beseech you to put this idea out of mind and continue writing about the North, which usually gets a good response from American readers.

  Discouraged but not convinced, I approached several Canadian publishers. Only one showed interest – Jack McClelland, who responded quickly:

  If the people in Boston don’t want a war book from you let us look at it. And let us get together and discuss the matter in a civilized manner as soon as possible. I suggest the rooftop bar of the Park Plaza, where the rum is nearly as good as the Pusser kind we used to gargle in the navy.

  Soon thereafter, I was able to phone Freddy Goforth and tell him McClelland & Stewart seemed game to publish the book if I would write it.

  As our third winter in Albion began, blizzards and snow-blocked roads provided an illusion that I was out of the line of fire in the skirmishes that were still erupting around People of the Deer. Nevertheless, I could not concentrate on a new writing project, probably because I was suffering from a kind of literary shellshock that made it difficult for me to write anything that might involve me in new hostilities. I was, however, able to relieve my writer’s itch by turning to my personal journal.

  Keeping journals is much less demanding than writing for publication. There is no need to equivocate or be evasive, and the results do not need to be primped, powdered, or rouged so as to pass muster with editors or literary critics. In January of 1953 my journal was my literary life raft.

  Jan. 14 Feeling lousy. Can’t concentrate worth a god damn. Have started about a dozen short pieces and three books since last autumn and they’ve all died still-born. I’m chock full of words but all I can produce is unsatisfactory farts. I can’t even write about the birds and the bees without sneaking a look over my shoulder to see if some irate hunter might be figuratively drawing a bead on me, which is a damned shame because if it wasn’t for the example of the non-human creatures I suspect I might become as virulently bellicose and bloodthirsty as all too fucking many of my fellow men. Bad cess to the lot of them!

  Jan. 20 As if I wasn’t already in deep shit, I’m surrounded by even deeper piles of it. Not my own this time though. Almost every farm around here has one or two lads from the Toronto Catholic Aid living on it. Families get paid a few bucks a month to keep these kids, orphans from ten years old on up, a lot of whom get their asses worked off and otherwise aren’t much better treated than house slaves from Uncle Tom’s Cabin country a hundred years ago. But what really makes me want to oil up my gun is that they get used as bum-boys by anyone takes a fancy to them.

  There’s one of the bung-holers only half a mile from us. Teaches at Upper Canada College and has bought himself a rundown farm out here as a get-away place where he can sculpt “the glories of the human form,” is what he says. He pays his subjects nickels and dimes and bribes their keepers with booze and cash to let him draw these kids, stark staring naked. And do other things. The kids don’t bitch because if they did they’d end up back at the Aid in Toronto, where life could get even worse. Or so they tell me.

  The hell of it is there doesn’t seem to be a damn thing Fran and I can do about it. Other than let the bum-fucker know we’re on to him. The cops don’t want to hear about it. Neither does anybody else I’ve talked to. It’s a See-no-evil situation with a capital S. We have befriended some of the lads, including a few who are savvy enough to steer clear of the bugger, like Murray Biloki, a good-looking kid who knows what’s what and maybe will amount to something some day but many of the Aid’s kids haven’t a snowball’s chance in hell of keeping clear.

  Damned if I can understand how we self-appointed Lords of the Universe can be so fucking rotten to those of our own kind who are just barely able to stay afloat because they’ve been kicked about like horse turds. And why don’t the rest of us holier-than-thou hypocrites have the guts to do what needs to be done about it?r />
  C’est la guerre, eh? No, by Jesus, c’est la humanité.

  Although March roared in with icy gales and blustery snowstorms, my spirits began to lift when the mail brought a formal contract from the Regimental Association. And then, soon afterwards, an envelope containing a cheque for three thousand dollars – by far the largest sum of money I had ever possessed.

  A few days after depositing this cheque, Lulu Belle and I drove off on the first of what would be many visits to the counties of Hasting and Prince Edward, journeys that would introduce me to the pre-war world of the men I had fought beside and whose lives and deaths would be the substance of my next book.

  Also that March, businessmen in the nearby town of Bolton formed a company to bring the telephone to Albion Township. Wires were strung, and soon one of the magic machines encased in its varnished wooden box was mounted on our kitchen wall. It was brought to life by lifting the receiver attached to one side of the box then rotating a hand crank on the other side, thereby sending a signal to the operator in Bolton. When and if she responded, you gave her the name of the exchange and the number of the party you wanted to reach and, quite often, you got through.

  This being a party line shared by fourteen families, incoming calls were identified by a ring code. Ours was two long and three short rings from two large bells which crowned the box. Their shattering tones could be heard a hundred yards away. Especially in the early days, this strident summons proved virtually irresistible to every family on our line, regardless of whose number was being rung. One by one, all or most of the receivers would be snatched from their hooks but, as each was lifted, the voltage on the line would drop until the voice of the caller would be reduced to an eerie whisper.

  As if this was not trouble enough, few of the listeners-in could resist the temptation to interject their own comments and observations into what were supposed to be private conversations. Pleas for privacy were generally ignored – until I hit upon a way to clear the line.

  Andy Lawrie, who had worked with me in the north, called up one day. Our conversation soon began to lose the battle with the voltage drop and the associated heavy breathing from the listeners-in, not all of whom restricted themselves to passive interference.

  “Speak up, can’t you!” demanded a testy voice I identified as belonging to widow Jane Finnerty. Then, “Charlie, you old fool, turn down your radio! I can’t hardly hear what that Mowat fellow’s saying!”

  It was then that inspiration struck. Remembering that Andy specialized in parasitology, I launched into a shouted description of a human parasite I had recently been reading about.

  “Called the guinea worm,” I bellowed into the mouthpiece. “Only as big around as a pencil lead but grows up to ten feet long. Burrows all through your body and every now and again crosses one of your eyeballs. That’s the one time you can do anything about it.

  “The natives have figured what to do. They take a stick and split one end, then slide the worm’s body into the cleft. Then – and here’s the tricky bit – you gradually wind the worm onto the stick. The victim has to do this himself, or herself, because it has to be done slow as molasses. It can take days because if you do it too fast the worm will break. And die. And rot. So then the patient dies – from massive and agonizing blood poisoning all through his, or her, body …”

  By this time the phone line had cleared so much I could hear Andy chuckling.

  “Gotcha!” he said, sounding now as if he was in the same room with me. “God had a purpose for everything he made, right? This must be why he made the guinea worm.”

  —–

  Having committed myself to writing a book about my regiment, I suggested to Frances that we spend a couple of months travelling around Europe so I could recapture the feel of the places I would be writing about.

  “Ah,” she said, “that would be hard to take but I could probably manage.”

  So out came the maps, and a few days later I booked us a flight to England in early May. I also arranged to buy a car for delivery in London so we could drive ourselves to remote places.

  When I broke the news of what was afoot to Dudley and Max, I also sent each of them a draft of the boys’ book I had been working on, hoping to make my decision to write a war book more palatable.

  Max replied noncommittally, but there was no response from Dudley so I wrote him again.

  Dear Dudley, March 10, 1953

  The silence from Boston grows oppressive. Damn it, Spring has come! The snows have melted! Polar bears have retreated northward! And Her Majesty’s Mails are being delivered regularly. So what about the boys’ book? Fran and I will depart May 1 for Italy and France, where we’ll be until mid-July so if you contemplate publication of the juvenile this year, any re-writing will have to be done in the hell of a hurry.

  The contract between myself and the Regiment is final, and I expect to complete their book by next Xmas. It is now well under way. Pretty hard to describe. Not a history in the usual sense; and it won’t be fiction. More of an emotional evocation of the lives and deaths of infantry soldiers of all time, with a subjective feel resembling that of People of the Deer. It is being written as a trade book, not as a pedantic tome of only accidental interest to the general public.

  A war novel is gestating side by side with it but won’t be in shape for an editor to look at for another 18 months.

  I miss your sage advice.

  Cheers.

  This time Dudley replied relatively swiftly with a bludgeoning of the boys’ book, including a demand from Little, Brown, backed by Atlantic Press, that I shorten it by a third, increase the ages of the principal characters from early teens to college students, and eliminate even the suggestion that any of my protagonists might be of mixed race.

  My reply was hardly politic.

  Dear D.

  If you’ll pardon my bluntness, what you and Helen James [the editor of “juvenile” books for Little, Brown] seem to want is a Grade B Hollywood scenario – a slicked-up version of Cowboys and Eskimos … you seem to want the entire book re-written with a complete change of emphasis so the “white” boy becomes a hero who rescues the native from disaster.… LB’s concept of Awasin as a savage possessed only of a certain primitive cunning and capacity to cope with nature in the raw is absolutely unacceptable. If you and LB want the book re-written along that line, I won’t do it. I value my association with Atlantic highly but have absolutely no interest in revising the book along the lines required by LB.

  F.

  To which I added a postscript designed, I suppose, to soften the impact somewhat.

  PS. We have acquired a telephone! BOLTON 19-78 is the number if you should ever care to use it, which won’t be easy since there are 14 families on the same party line, and the other 13 are enjoying the novelty by day and night. Maybe you can hear the din they make way down south?

  Not surprisingly, Dudley failed to call me.

  —–

  Trans-Canada Airlines’ North Star, a refurbished, prop-driven, wartime DC-4, departed from Malton airport north of Toronto in a drizzle on the first day of May.

  Fran and I unabashedly held hands as we stared uneasily out the small porthole into the swirling murk. As the aircraft lumbered along at seventeen thousand feet, we were given trays of chicken salad and tomato aspic, which we had to balance precariously on pillows held on our laps, but we did have real silver, linen napkins, and crystal wine glasses.

  The wine did Fran a lot of good.

  “If we have to go down in flames,” she said, with a sidelong glance out the porthole at the red-hot exhaust belching from the nearest Merlin engine, “at least we’ll go in style.”

  We descended into Goose Bay, Labrador, an hour before dusk, landing at a nominally Canadian, but effectively American, air force base. While the plane was being refuelled, we were herded into a bleak hangar by a U.S. armed escort. The task of our slouching and slovenly G.I. guards presumably was to prevent the Russian spies amongst us from taking pictu
res of Sabre jets and a score or more B-52 bombers parked in the dim distance.

  Darkness had fallen before we took off for the ten-hour voyage across the ocean. Our seats were beside the starboard wing, and one of the Rolls-Royce Merlins seemed only an arm’s length away, spitting a long stream of blue flame. The bellowing thunder kept us from sleep. We squirmed fearfully in our seats the long night through, and got no good of it.

  The morning of a sunny spring day had dawned when we made a lazy swing over the green islands of Arran and Kintyre before descending into a Royal Air Force base at Prestwick. There were no armed guards here – only a family of young jackdaws perched on a roof ridge, nerving themselves for first flight. Whenever an aircraft roared off the runway, they would teeter forward yearningly then, at the last moment, lose their nerve and scrabble back up the ridgepole.

  Airborne again, we flew south at low altitude, avidly taking in the sights. Great numbers of small, round ponds scattered in fields and woods near Liverpool piqued Fran’s curiosity. What could they be?

  “Bomb craters,” I explained. “German bombs which missed Liverpool or were jettisoned by Jerry pilots anxious to head for home. Look at them now! Pretty little frog ponds for cows to drink out of and kids to paddle in.”

  And so to London, which had become a madhouse as it prepared itself for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. The city was so heavily be-draped and bedecked with webs of scaffolding, miles of bunting, and forests of flags that we could hardly get a peek at her face.

  If not much else was visible, St. Paul’s was still able to float its dome above the tinsel. I flagged a cab to take us there. When the driver heard I had been in London during the Blitz, he volunteered a guided tour of the bombed-out and un-reconstructed wastelands behind the cathedral. The spectacle of those endless blocks of rubble was a stunner for Frances.