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{ chapter seven }
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chapter 7
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15/11/15
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{ late june 1963 – late december 1964 }
Sixteen years after leaving the city, now with two adolescents and an infant in tow, we were back in
Montreal. We arrived on a sultrily hot evening and were driven to the furnished apartment that we’d
rented through Alex’s family. Patti was so adrenalized by the long flight and the time zone shift that
the first order of business was to get a mild sedative into the dear girl. She was soon right as rain.
Alex set about looking for work almost immediately. An amazing coincidence occurred in
connection with his search: One day he went for an interview at a certain company; he thought the
interview had gone well. That evening the apartment building janitor knocked at the door. Could
he, he asked, show our apartment to a couple who were considering renting one just like it? For
some reason he couldn’t show them the unit that was actually for rent. “Of course,” we said, and in
walked the businessman who’d interviewed Alex that morning, with a much younger woman who
obviously wasn’t his wife. Alex and the man exchanged glances, said nothing. The woman, oblivious,
looked around the apartment while the janitor extolled its features. The janitor thanked us then he
and the couple left. Alex filled us in. He never heard back from that firm.
Just as we’d arrived in Caracas on the very day the president was assassinated, we arrived in
Montreal at a historic juncture: The Front de libération du Québec, a militant group dedicated to
the notion of separating the province of Quebec from the Canadian federation, had just weeks
earlier set off a number of bombs in mailboxes (symbols of federalism) in Westmount (a wealthy
enclave of English-speaking Montrealers and a symbol to the flq of Anglo-Saxon imperialism).
Separatism, violence, and language were the big topics of the day during the summer of ’sixty-three.
Separatism and language rights are still at the top of the agenda in Quebec, but these memoirs aren’t
the place to explore all of that.
Before long we were notified that our car had arrived. Alex and Gerry made their way down to
the freight forwarder’s offices in the harbour area and drove back in what surely was the only car in
the city with Belgian licence plates.
Alex had been borrowing his sister Dorothy’s car on occasion. With our own car, now we could
start to look for a house to rent. We found one, a little house with a big garden and huge old trees, in
Beaconsfield, where we’d been told there was a good high school. The house was more modest than
anything the boys had ever known, but we all took the new situation in stride.
As soon as the furniture arrived from Belgium we moved from the apartment to the house.
The early days there were not without incident. In fact, a disaster was very narrowly averted. One
afternoon I was out grocery shopping with Gerry. Kirk and Patti were at the house, watching TV.
Kirk suddenly noticed smoke curling up between the floorboards. He put his palm on them: they
were hot. He took Patti into the garden, told her to Sit there and don’t move, went down into the
basement to find roaring flames fanning out of a trash can and across the ceiling. There was a little
greenhouse the entrance to which was through the basement. In there he knew there was a garden
hose. He grabbed it, opened the spigot, trained the flow on the blaze and extinguished it. It was a
case of spontaneous combustion. But for Kirk’s quick thinking, the house might well have burned
to the ground. Our guardian angel was on high alert that afternoon, just as she (he?) had been that
day on the mountain road outside Caracas.
In September the boys started at Beaconsfield High School. After six years of non-coed
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schooling, they found being in classes that were half female very distracting to begin with. And
after the rather staid attitudes that prevailed at the Athénée Royal de Spa, the idea of, for example,
Friday-night dances at the school struck them as very wild. Wow, they dance at school here! On the
other hand, in Spa they could wear what they wanted to school. At Beaconsfield they had to wear
white shirts, neckties, blue blazers, and grey flannel trousers to class. I thought they looked great in
their uniforms.
They were at the avant-garde of a certain style, one could say: Boys were wearing their hair
longer in Europe than in North America. Gerry’s and Kirk’s longish hair struck their Beaconsfield
classmates as odd. But within a few months John, Paul, George, and Ringo — the “mop tops,” the
“fab four” — were all the rage in North America, just as they were in England, and many Canadian
teenage boys started sporting Beatle haircuts, my two teenagers among them.
Late that summer Alex found a job with a paper company. He commuted, by car, from
Beaconsfield, a community on what’s known as the Lakeshore, into the city. He was very happy to
be busy and productive and earning again.
November 22, 1963, is of course forever associated with the assassination of President Kennedy.
On that Friday afternoon I was sewing, watching TV out of the corner of my eye. Patti was in
another room, puttering away in her big cardboard playhouse. A little after 1:30 came the bulletin:
“We interrupt this program for an important announcement. In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired
at President Kennedy’s motorcade.” And soon after that came confirmation that Kennedy had died
of his wounds. I was as stunned as everyone on the planet. The boys came home unexpectedly — the
school had closed early in the wake of the news. Gerry told me his chemistry teacher had wept
when he’d told the class of the assassination. The world watched TV news all weekend. Though
we tried not to let carefree little Patti absorb any of our shock and horror, we watched a lot of the
coverage ourselves. In my mind’s eye I see us watching on the Sunday, when Oswald, the assassin,
was himself gunned down, on live television, though I’m not certain we were. I am sure of this: for
years — decades — after that event, the city of Dallas was emblematic of hate, crime, and duplicity.
That first winter was a shock. It was orders of magnitude worse than the worse winter in Spa.
The shovelling, the shivering, the overshoes and long johns … Alex and Gerry didn’t mind it as
much as Kirk and I did. And Kirk missed Europe, whereas Gerry was enjoying being a North
American.
The Beaconsfield house, we discovered, wasn’t properly insulated. The big bedroom, in
particular, which had been added to the original structure, was problematic. I developed a bad case
of bronchitis. Antibiotics cleared it up, but we resolved, and not just for reasons of home insulation,
to not spend another winter there.
Nineteen sixty-four: The boys finished their school year. Neither did as well at bhs as they’d done
when studying in French at l’Athénée in Spa. There must have been a reason for this, but I’ve never
fathomed it.
Alex and I spent weekends that summer and autumn looking for a house to buy. We found one
in our price range in a new development called Fairview Village in the new community of Dollarddes-Ormeaux (Adam Dollard des Ormeaux was a seventeenth-century colonist and a soldier of
New France). For a while Dollard-des-Ormeaux (ddo, or simply Dollard, in Montreal shorthand)
was the fastest-growing community in Canada. It was built on what had been farmland. To service
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Dollard, St. John’s Road (Montée St-Jean, en bon français) had rapidly been transformed from a
two-lane country way, slightly askew, into a broad suburban thoroughfare, straight as an arrow. We moved just before Christmas. Our address for the next twenty-three years would be 374 Blue
Haven Drive, Dollard-des-Ormeaux. We had a twenty-five-year mortgage at a low interest rate to
pay off, but we finally owned the roof over our heads. We’d lived in rented rooms during the postwar
Montreal housing shortage; we’d lived in hotels and rented five apartments and two houses while
living overseas; now, at last, we felt like the commanders of our own ship.
In the aftermath of the move, the school board rules were kinder to Gerry than to Kirk. Ger had
just one full year of high school to go, so he was allowed to stay on at Beaconsfield High. Kirk had
two left, so he was transferred to John Rennie High, which is closer to Dollard. For the first time in
their lives, they no longer travelled to and from school together.
It was during this time that Alex’s great-aunt Edith died. He had visited her a couple of times during
her last days. Poor old Edith Ward. She lived a life of lack, as I mentioned back in Chapter Two.
And the Mercedes “died,” too. That European-market model wasn’t made for Canada’s cold
winters and salty roads, and it didn’t last long in Montreal. Not surprisingly, Alex never liked any
other of his cars as much as he’d liked that Merc.
{ january 1965 – december 1974 }
The month after we set up on Blue Haven, a couple with four teenagers moved into the house across
the street from ours, one house over. We saw only their comings and goings until spring, when we
and they and all our neighbours emerged from our homes to enjoy the weather and the outdoors.
So it was that we met the Weaver family — Edith and Jack and their kids, Bryan, Alan, Sheila, and
Lynda. Little did Edith — Edie — and I know, that spring, that we would become dear, close friends
for decades to come. I still see Edie at least once or twice a week, as I’ll describe in the next chapter.
I mentioned that Dollard was for a time the fastest-growing community in the country. So it
wasn’t surprising when Canada’s then-biggest shopping centre was built just a ways up St. John’s
Road from Fairview Village. Gerry and Kirk — along with hundreds of other teenagers — found
various part-time jobs at Fairview Shopping Centre. For a while Gerry was working at Eaton’s,
the department store at the west end of the complex, while Kirk was working at Simpson’s, the
department store at its east end. That spring Gerry also worked at the garden centre just behind
Blue Haven Drive. I would sometimes see him hauling huge bales of peat moss while I worked at
the kitchen sink.
Gerry graduated high school. He’d saved enough money to put himself through first year
university and enrolled at Sir George Williams University (which later became Concordia). He had
no idea what he wanted to do in life, so he signed up for a Bachelor of Arts.
That summer, after high school and before university, he took a job that saw him leave home:
He was waiting on tables at the Beaconsfield Golf Club and he and his coworkers, male and female,
lived in staff quarters at the club. Other than the occasional overnight stay at a friend’s, this was the
first time he’d spent his nights away from home. He loved it — he and his cohorts had a fun summer
(probably a pretty wild one, too!) at the club — but to me it signified the pending beginning of
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another era, and I had a little cry, the day Alex drove him down there.
Sir George’s campus was downtown. Come September Ger was commuting by train (sometimes
getting a ride to the station with another student, sometimes hitchhiking the distance) into the city.
He earned pocket money by working various part-time jobs.
Kirk meanwhile was finishing high school at John Rennie. He didn’t enjoy that last year at all.
He missed Belgium; he felt like a square peg in a round hole at that school. The highlight of his time
there was playing the guitar at various school events.
Nor was Gerry very enthusiastic about his studies. He had no idea what he wanted to do in life,
as I mentioned above. He was a bit of a non-conformist. (So was Kirk, for that matter.) Before the
fall semester was even through, he was talking about not re-enrolling for the following year.
Nineteen sixty-six: The school year ended. Kirk graduated high school, Gerry graduated his
freshman year at Sir George. They heard, I can’t remember how, that there was good money to
be earned picking tobacco leaves in Southern Ontario. I was horrified at this notion — I pictured
them among migrant workers with criminal records! — but I said little about my reservations. It
was their idea of an adventure and soon the two of them, plus a couple of their buddies, hitchhiked
up Highway 401, looking for … looking for something other than another summer in suburbia.
They didn’t immediately find work picking tobacco but they did find work in a canning factory in
a place called Wallaceburg. They lived at a boarding house and put in long shifts on the canning
lines — corn and beets, if I recall. They hated it, of course. They heard about a tobacco-picking
opportunity close to where they were staying and picked tobacco on their days off from canning.
They hated that back-breaking work even more. After some weeks — not many, as I recall — of bluecollar employment, they hitched back to Montreal, banked their earnings, which of course weren’t
as good as they’d imagined they’d be, and thought about their next step.
Kirk missed Europe terribly. Gerry liked Montreal. Being in the heart of Montreal was one of the
few aspects he’d enjoyed about his semesters at Sir George Williams. Kirk began talking about going
back to Belgium to … he wasn’t sure what he’d do once he got there, but he was sure he didn’t want
to be in “Dollard-des-maudits-Ormeaux,” as he put it (maudits means damned). For a while Gerry
considered going with him. They managed through a friend of a friend of Alex to find passage
aboard a Britain-bound freighter. We didn’t know it then, but that voyage was her last — she was
scrapped soon after docking in Avonmouth, Bristol’s port, at the head of the Bristol Channel.
Before the sailing date, Gerry decided not to go. So seventeen-year-old Kirk boarded the
Sunclipper on his own, that rainy autumn night we drove down to the East End docks. My heart was
in my stomach. Every crew member walking up the gangplank looked like a pervert to me. When
the captain told us Kirk would be bunking in the sick bay, next to his own quarters, I breathed a bit
more easily. But it was very hard for us to watch him go up the gangplank with just his guitar case,
his duffel bag, and his brave smile. The sick bay accommodation was appropriate, as it turned out:
the poor lad was sick as a dog all the way across the heaving Atlantic, almost up to the moment the
ship docked.
From Bristol he took the train to London; from there to Wallington. He found his way to my
parents’ flat, only to find them out. He waited for their return. “Well, I’ll be damned if it isn’t our
Kirk,” said Dad, when he found his grandson on the landing. Dad had never been a good sailor
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either; he sympathized when Kirk said he’d never board a ship again as long as he lived. Kirk stayed
a few days with Mother and Dad.
He wrote and told us about the passage. There’d been days on end of thirty-foot waves. There’d
been days of not seeing the horizon. There was the stormy night the ship had drifted, engineless,
while a piston was noisily repaired and Kirk quietly conjectured that his days were up. He’d hated
every minute of every day and night, had thought of nothing but the moment of debarkation. Then
there was the inglorious docking, three days late, at Avonmouth. Whether the problem was on
the bridge or in the engine room, whether the malfunction was between Slow and Dead Slow, or
Dead Slow Ahead and Dead Slow Astern, or Dead Slow and Stop, Kirk never learned — but the ship
crashed into and damaged the pier, sending local dockhands scrambling for safety. Her hull, too,
was impaired in the collision. “I went ashore the moment I could, and never even glanced back,”
he wrote. Good God, I thought, and I was happy I’d known nothing of her state of repair when she
weighed anchor and he sailed off.
An aside: In 2014, almost five decades after that trip, Kirk wondered, Are there any photos of the
Sunclipper on the Internet? On a site called Shipspotters he found a photo of her. She was approaching
Avonmouth, in the photo, oddly enough. Then he noticed the date of the photo: November 1966. I was
aboard her when this photo was taken, he realized. There was a solitary figure standing at the prow.
Could that be me? he wondered. He remembered standing up there as the voyage ended, looking
forward to terra firma. He contacted the photographer, whose name and e-mail address were shown,
and asked whether a higher-resolution version of the photo existed. There was a better image; the
shooter sent it to Kirk; it was him in the photo, he was certain. He and the photographer might well
have glimpsed each other, might well have waved at each other, those forty-eight years earlier.
Back to Kirk in Wallington, 1966: He did a bit of research and discovered he could fly inexpensively
from Southend-on-Sea, a little airport on the Thames Estuary, to an equally small facility in Ostend,
on the Belgian coast. He did that, then hitchhiked across the country to Spa. He was very happy to
be back. He looked up old school friends and soon found lodging with one of them, a young man
whose widowed mother was happy of the extra income. Then he found a job tending bar. He loved
being a Spadois again, enjoyed walking again in the woods that he knew and loved.
With Kirk absent, missed, overseas, Alex and Gerry bonded over jazz. Several times they went
downtown to listen to Alex’s favourite music. They went to a club in Old Montreal called The Black
Bottom, I recall, and to a hall at McGill University. And to wherever jazz was playing. It was during
that time that Gerry started drinking coffee. Alex drank his black, so Ger did likewise. Tel père, tel
fils — like father, like son.
At some point that autumn Gerry found a job in an art gallery downtown. He rented his first little
apartment. In cafés and coffee bars he was meeting people and making friends — artists, designers,
window dressers, journalists, photographers. He was on the edge of Montreal’s creative community;
he was happy. We saw him on weekends. He’d visit, do a wash, enjoy a home-cooked meal. He’d
sometimes bring a friend or two.
During those months, by and large, we were a household of three — Patti, Alex, and me. I was
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busy with sewing. Edie and I often got together; we were becoming close friends. Patti was growing
and happy and enjoying life on Blue Haven Drive, the only life she could really remember. She
missed Kirk — we all missed Kirk — and she was always happy to see Ger, but she was a lovely, happy
kid, funny and bright as a button.
Men at work:
I set about making some improvements to the house and garden. I hired a French-Canadian
homme à tout faire, a man of all trades. He knocked down the wall between the original, small
kitchen–dining room and what had been a little den or fourth bedroom. Then he put in wide,
sliding glass doors so that we could access the back garden without going through the car port — so
much better, so much more pleasant. The result was a bright, spacious, welcoming “great room” (as
great as would fit into the little bungalow, at least). We could comfortably seat eight or more guests
at the new, long table we bought, and I could converse with them even as I worked in the kitchen.
The room was big enough, too, for a desk where I could sew as I kept an eye on the stove.
Next I tackled the living room. I’d wanted a fireplace ever since we’d moved in. At the far end of
the room my homme à tout faire installed a little factory-built fireplace and a raised brick hearth.
Then he got busy with the shelves, shuttered storage areas, and bricked-in firewood nook that I’d
sketched out. The room went from bland and charmless to cozy and inviting. I was thrilled with the
transformation. The back garden consisted of a gentle slope from house to fence. It too was charmless. I hired
two Italian gardeners to transform it, too. They converted the slope into two flat areas and built a
stone drywall (a wall of stones not cemented together) between the two levels, with stone steps
at either end. In among the flat stones were set rock garden plants. I was very pleased with the
outcome. It reminded me a bit of our garden at La Courtille. And the gardeners were very pleased
with Alex’s little liquid bonus at the conclusion of the work: a good shot of Italian grappa. He’d
discovered the brandy-type spirit while in Italy during the war. It’s the kind of drink that to me feels
like lava on the tongue and in the gullet, but the two Italians found it comfortingly familiar and the
three men downed a shot of it while I toasted with something much softer.
I also had a portion of the basement finished and set it up as a large bedroom with a big desk
area. I had overnight guests in mind and I thought, When Kirk returns he can sleep down here; it’s a
quiet zone, too — he’ll enjoy it for practicing guitar. I also figured, Someday we’ll get a plumber to add
a shower and a toilet down here and make a real guest suite.
I was very happy with my efforts — happy as a cat with a bowl of cream. 374 Blue Haven was
suddenly much more attractive, much more livable, much more us.
We planted a number of bushes in the back garden, and a willow on the lower level. Edie and
I drank innumerable cups of tea under that willow while we watched Patti play, sometimes on her
own, sometimes with her little neighbour friends.
Dear little Patti. I enrolled her in a nursery school near the house. The children’s mothers were
expected to take turns being present to help the teacher. Nice idea, I thought. I was sitting at the back
of the class one day when I heard the teacher say, irritatedly, “What do you think you’re doing?!”
I looked up to see Patti staring at the teacher with a shocked look on her face. The kids had been
asked to write a string of capital A’s in their books. Patti knew the alphabet; she’d written a string
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of A’s and had followed it with a string of B’s. The teacher’s tone of voice was much too harsh, I
felt. I took Patti’s hand. “Come along, Darling,” I said, “this is no place for you.” The teacher looked
stunned as I led Patti toward the door. We walked home.
I was furious. I was disgusted with the teacher. I wrote a letter to the local paper about the
incident, quoting her verbatim. “This wasn’t a frazzled high school teacher at the end of a day with
rude and rowdy teenagers,” I wrote. “This was a nursery teacher with a group of five-year-olds,
eager little kids getting their very first experience of taking instructions from someone other than a
parent or older sibling.” I continued: “No wonder so many kids are put off by the very idea of school;
no wonder so many are rebels by the time they reach high school.”
My letter was signed. Our phone rang off the hook as soon as the paper was published. The
owner of every nursery school in the area demanded that I reveal which school I’d written about.
I’ve opened a tin of worms, I realized. No nursery school wanted any ambiguity as to whether
the outburst I’d reported had occurred on its premises; none wanted a black cloud hanging over
its reputation. Yet I was uncomfortable pointing the finger at the school where the incident had
occurred. In the end I composed a second letter where I listed all the local nurseries where the
incident had not occurred. I never heard from the one where it did occur. I heard later that that
teacher had resigned.
Ever since, Patti has had fun calling herself “a nursery school dropout.” She enjoyed all her
schooling and in elementary school won a cup for being the student most helpful to teachers and
fellow students alike. Bravo, Darling! Brava, to be precise about it.
Nineteen sixty-seven! Centennial year! Expo 67!
The year of the hundredth anniversary of Canadian Confederation was upon us. The 1967
International and Universal Exposition opened in Montreal and the whole world descended on the
city. Expo 67 is considered to have been the most successful World’s Fair of the twentieth century;
it set an all-time single-day attendance record of 569,500 visitors — over half a million visitors on
two little islands in the St. Lawrence. Among the Expo 67 visitors were my parents. More about their
visit in a moment.
But Expo 67 spelled the end of a chapter for Ger: That March the rent on his little Peel Street
apartment doubled. The landlord understandably wanted to cash in on Expo fever (which, by the
way, raged well beyond Canada’s borders: Kirk had carefully painted a big Expo 67 logo on his duffel
bag; in Europe it served as an aid to hitchhiking and as a general icebreaker). Gerry had to move
back home. He commuted to his downtown job by various means including on his little motorcycle.
Alex and I hated thinking about him in rush-hour traffic on that thing.
Yes, my parents visited that summer. It was the year of their golden wedding anniversary. It was
very special for them to celebrate that in Canada. We all visited Expo a number of times, of course.
It was a magical summer in Montreal. The city seemed to be the very epicentre of the universe.
Gerry’s girlfriend Sherri visited the house a number of times. She found Dad’s accent and sense of
humour hilarious; he basked in her attention. While they were on this continent, Mother and Dad
also visited Hazel and Morris and their other set of grandchildren.
Kirk came home! That was a happy day indeed. He’d found a cheap flight — Luxembourg–Montreal
via Reykyavik, Iceland, and Gander, Newfoundland — and in August 1967 surprised us with an On
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my way telegram. We all trooped out to Dorval Airport to greet him. It was wonderful to have him
back.
He found work downtown at Holt Renfrew, a fancy men’s clothing store, no less, where he got
a deep discount on clothing and became a sudden fashion plate. With his lion’s-mane hair and his
sharp suits, he cut a striking figure.
He told us of his overseas adventures. After bartending in Spa he’d worked as a chef ’s aide in
a restaurant on the Belgian coast and loved the experience — to this day he’s the main cook in his
home. While walking on the beach early one morning, he and a friend had discovered the body of
an old woman washed up by the sea. They alerted the police, who arrived with an ambulance and a
doctor. It was too late for medical attention. The body was dislodged from the sand and taken away
on a stretcher. The news of the drowning filled the local papers, but the mystery of her identity had
not been solved by the time Kirk left the region.
For a while we had a full house again — Kirk was in the basement suite and Gerry was sleeping
upstairs. Patti was thrilled to have both brothers home.
After a job in a second art gallery, Gerry landed his first job in the graphic design business. He
became the apprentice right-hand man to an established designer (he’d been at it so long that he
still used the earlier term “commercial artist”) who ran a one-man office — two, with Ger — of long
standing on Crescent Street, downtown. Gerry bought all the books on visual communication that
he could find and set about educating himself in that field. He’s been in it ever since.
At about the same time, another first took place. Kirk began playing regular, paying gigs at
a popular bar (the Winston Churchill Pub, “the best bar in the world,” according to an in-flight
magazine of the time). He played and sang, several nights per week, on a little stage at the far end
of what everyone knew simply as “the Pub,” also on Crescent Street. He met lots of people while
providing entertainment there. He too has been in that field, music, ever since.
Their intertwined stories over the next couple of years, in a few broad strokes:
After some months of commuting downtown together, the boys — they were young men
now — rented a two-bedroom apartment in an old building in a part of town that was popular with
their cohort. Today it’s known as Shaughnessey Village; back then it was simply the Atwater-to-Guy
area. They enjoyed living there, and I enjoyed knowing they were together. I was especially happy
to know that his brother was there for Ger after his emergency appendectomy. They befriended a
number of their neighbours, one of whom will show up in these pages some … some sixteen years
after the era I’m now describing.
At that time (still today, but to a lesser extent), the downtown core of Montreal was in many
ways a village within a city. Kirk and Gerry had many, many friends living within a few blocks of
where they did. They really enjoyed those carefree, “young at heart in the heart of the city” days.
But nothing lasts forever. At a certain point Gerry met Judi McDonald. And before long, Gerry
and Judi, twenty-one and eighteen at the time, were talking about leaving their roommates, Kirk
and Vicki, and renting an apartment together. And then they did move in together. So Kirk found
an apartment of his own.
But — second “but” paragraph in a row — by now Kirk had left his job at the fancy menswear
shop and, always artistic, always personable, had found one in … graphic design. He was working
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for a group that consisted of several modules. He was in the module that produced the artwork
for printing various items — booklets, packages, posters, etc. The module that was responsible for
dreaming up “the creative” — the concept for the artwork that had to be produced, its design — was
short one designer. Kirk put Gerry’s name forth and before long they were working together — living
a few blocks apart, but working within the same suite of offices in a Mansfield Street skyscraper.
Kirk wasn’t cut out to work in an office, however. Soon he was playing as often as he wanted at
the Pub and playing gigs elsewhere, too. And as soon as he could support himself on his earnings
as a musician, he left that job in design and was never a salaried employee again. I’m a musician,
dammit, he rationalized, and that was that.
From there it was a short step to I think I’ll go back to Spa and work not as a bartender, not in a
kitchen, but as a singer-guitarist. And soon we were seeing him off again. At the airport this time.
This farewell was much easier than the 1966 Sunclipper farewell, of course. This trip included an
impromptu, last-minute, tag-along travel partner. The misadventure began at the Pub: When he’d
described Spa and his plans to his acquaintance Pat, she’d said, “Gee, that sounds great, I wish I was
going with you.” In a moment of … inattention? offhandedness? he’d replied, “Well, come along.”
(Forever since: “One of the stupidest things I ever said.”) In any event, off they went on a trip that
turned out to be fraught.
I was beginning to see a pattern. I hoped I was wrong — time proved I was right — but I thought,
It’s wanderlust; he’s never going to be a Montrealer. And I thought, Not surprising, this wanderlust,
after that childhood.
Back on Blue Haven Drive life was steady as she goes.
The paper company that Alex had been working for was bought by another firm, one that didn’t
require his services. But he was a known quantity to the original company’s auditors, and within
a very short period they’d recommended him for another position, which he landed straightaway.
And in fact he was never again without work for longer than two or three days.
Patti was enjoying and doing well in grade school.
I was sewing, as usual.
Alex and I socialized with our Fairview Village neighbours: the Kerridges (more about Pat
Kerridge in the pages ahead), the Hawkers, the Weavers of course, and other couples and families
whose faces — whose houses, even — I can picture, but whose names escape me. It was a nice time, a
nice place.
To the old country, with a side trip to the Continent:
In ’sixty-eight Patti turned seven. That summer she and I went to England. She was such a lovely
little travel companion — cheerful, curious, friendly. We visited Winnie and Charlie — Patti had been
an infant last time they’d seen her — and of course we spent time with my parents.
I wanted her to see Spa, too, the lovely little town where she was born.
Wallington–Spa was a big day: We left my parents’ place very early and took the train to London.
From there, another to Dover. This one linked up with the ferry to Ostend. I was so happy to see the
White Cliffs of Dover again. From Ostend we took a train to Brussels. Every passenger was a pipesmoking man, it seemed. At the enormous Brussels station — cocking my ear for announcements in
French, disregarding those in Flemish — there was a mad dash to the right platform for the train to
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Liège. There we boarded our sixth conveyance of the day, a little train to Spa.
It was a delight to find myself, with my little Spadoise, in the Spa railway station. We took a
taxi to the home of Blanche Noirhomme, our former landlady, where we’d be staying. She was
waiting outside, bless her, with her lifelong friend Loulou. There were hugs all around. They were
enormously relieved that we’d made it at the appointed hour, and we were enormously relieved to
be there, in their arms, chez Blanche, in dear little Spa.
Everyone was pleased to see us. Blanche’s family and friends, former neighbours up on avenue
de la Bovière, friends I’d missed, shopkeepers we’d known, the owners of restaurants we’d frequented
… It was so wonderful. Patti couldn’t understand what I was talking about, with all these people,
but she could tell that we were being warmly received. We rode the tourist buses and walked all
over town. I took great delight in showing her the building where she’d been born; La Courtille, the
home she’d known as an infant; l’Athénée, the school her brothers had attended; the hotel we’d lived
in before our furniture arrived; and so many other landmarks. We had a lovely week.
Spa–Wallington was another big day. Patti remembers that one, vividly, for the scare she had,
the poor child, probably the worst scare of her childhood. We’d boarded the Dover ferry and found
a comfortable spot to enjoy the crossing. I told her, “Sit tight, I’ll be right back. I’m just going to the
currency exchange to change these Belgian francs back into sterling.” I didn’t tell her the currency
exchange was on the ferry. When the ship started to pull away from the dock and I was still absent,
the poor dear was frantic. When she saw me she flew into my arms. “I thought you were on land!”
she cried. I felt awful. She was seasick that day, too. The Channel was rough. Bad day all around.
By the time we got back to Wallington she was exhausted. She wanted to tell Mother and
Dad about our adventures, but could barely keep her eyes open. They — my parents, and the
adventures — waited until the next morning.
Dad treated us to lunch at one of his favourite restaurants. It was on the rooftop of Derry &
Toms, the old Kensington High Street department store. The food was delicious and the views
were great. But what made it special was that there were little songbirds flying about: skimming the
diners, eating crumbs off the tables, and so on. This was right up Dad’s alley — I’m remembering
Bobby, the canary that would eat peas from Dad’s dinner plate — and Patti and Mother and I loved
the experience too.
One last memory of that trip: The day before Patti and I flew back to Montreal, we took Mother
and Dad, plus an old friend of Dad’s, an ex-soldier, to the seashore near Brighton. We ate lunch at a
restaurant. We were late for lunch, in fact, the elderly waitress pointed out. “We’ve not got much left,”
she said. Dad decided to try the menu item called Best End of Neck of Lamb. Sounds like some kind
of last-resort wartime cut of meat, I thought. Later the poor old gal asked him how he’d enjoyed it.
“Well, my dear,” he said with a straight face, “if that was the best end of the neck, I’m certainly glad
I didn’t order the other end.” She apologized, but plainly didn’t quite get the hang of Dad’s sense of
humour.
The next morning, he and Mother saw Patti and me down to the taxi. We had big hugs. A few
tears, too. I told them how much I’d loved spending that time with them, how special it had been.
That was the last time I saw my dear father, God bless him.
In late ’sixty-nine, footloose, fancy-free, freshly returned from “the trip that followed one of the
stupidest things I ever said,” Kirk met Dwight Druick, another accomplished Montreal guitarist
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who was also working on writing songs. They immediately liked each other’s work and style and
… “groove,” they might have said. Winter was approaching. They decided to spend it in the Greek
islands, write songs together, then try to cut an album together in London (this was back in the days
of vinyl albums, of course). Once again we saw Kirk off. Dwight’s parents were at Dorval Airport,
too. I liked the notion that Kirk was travelling with a real friend. They were both very upbeat.
The nineteen seventies arrived, inevitably, and with the new decade came a time of grief.
My father died in 1972 at the age of seventy-nine. He suffered a heart attack at home and died
on a stretcher somewhere between his front door and the ambulance. It was that detail that I found
unutterably sad. He deserved to die in bed, holding Mother’s hand, I thought — not in transit like that.
He’s buried in the graveyard of St. Mary the Virgin, at Beddington, where Alex and I were married.
Winnie Bowers passed away shortly after Dad. She was a few years older than him.
I thought of Mother, coping, alone. She’d known Dad since right around the turn of the century.
But she was strong, I knew. I thought of Charlie Bowers. I wished for him Mother’s strength.
Even for the inevitable, even for the predestined, it’s hard to prepare oneself, emotionally, I thought.
But other aspects of my life brought me happiness. Patti was doing well in school. She had lots of
friends. Gerry was enjoying his work. He and Judi visited regularly. Alex, though he never enjoyed
any job after 1963 as much as he’d enjoyed his work at Uniroyal, wasn’t unhappy. I loved reading
news from Kirk — from Mykonos and later from London — and hearing about his and Dwight’s
progress.
Something happened that gave me and (especially) my mother a thrill. Little Judi, Gerry’s
girlfriend, who was a fashion model, got an assignment in London. She got Mother’s address and
phone number from Gerry and visited her in Wallington. They spent an evening together, no doubt
talking about England (it was Judi’s first visit, her first time in Europe), no doubt talking about the
Loranges. I loved thinking of Judi in the little Rectory Lane flat that I knew so well, brightening my
recently widowed mother’s outlook. “It was just like taking tea with Twiggy,” Mother later wrote.
And something happened that gave Alex and Patti and me an even bigger thrill. Kirk wrote Ger:
I’m planning a visit; pick me up and we’ll surprise the family. They sure did! Ironically, when Gerry
had said, “I’m coming to visit on [whatever evening it was],” we’d said, “Gee, we have [something]
that night, Son.” When he’d replied, “It’s really important; I’d really like you to be there,” we’d thought
he was engaged to be married, or about to launch his own business, or some such. So we changed
our schedule and waited for him to show up. Alex happened to be in the driveway when Gerry’s taxi
pulled up. I heard him say, “Christ, Kirk’s here!”
Oh, what a fun evening we had. Kirk described his winter on Mykonos, his work with Dwight.
He told us about the deals they’d struck in London: the agreement with the management company,
the recording contract, the upcoming studio sessions. He was so happy, so excited.
But he told us a hair-raising story that broke the mood. He’d been travelling by car with a couple
of friends, somewhere south of Heathrow. Suddenly traffic had started to slow ahead. They saw cars
parked by the roadside, they saw people running across the highway. They prepared themselves
for the sight of a bad car crash. When the row of trees to their right ended, they couldn’t believe
their eyes: a jetliner had crashed. Its tail, emblazoned with a huge Union Jack, stood smoking in
a meadow. Its fuselage was sickenly flattened. They stopped and got out of the car. It was eerily
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quiet, he said. The smell of jet fuel was overpowering. Emergency vehicles hadn’t yet arrived. They
stood there, stunned, as emergency vehicles did arrive, noisily, from both directions. Presently the
wreckage was swarming with rescue crews.
They left, speechless. Later they found out that all the passengers and crew had been killed. For
a long time to come it was the deadliest air disaster in Britain. “It was the most horrifying thing I’ve
ever seen,” he said.
Everything is linked to everything, isn’t it? On the evening of the plane crash Kirk was in a pub in
Kensington, in central London, with his friend Buzz. He talked about the terrible things he’d seen
that afternoon, with Buzz and with the stranger who was sitting next to them at the bar. That young
man, Richard, stayed in touch with Kirk. Some weeks later, he invited Kirk to a dinner party. At that
party a landmark event occurred in Kirk’s life: he met a young woman who will appear many times
in the pages ahead.
He mentioned her that night on Blue Haven. “I met an interesting girl in London,” he said. “She’s
Australian. She’s been in Europe for a couple of years now. Picks grapes in France in the fall. She’s a
fantastic cook! Her name is Patricia too, but she goes by Tricia. Tricia Magee. Trish. We’re going to
get together when I go back to London to record.”
He always looked up his buddies and kindred spirits when he was in town. He was still in touch
(since their days at Beaconsfield High) with Bruce, Ian, and Scott Howarth. A newer friend was Ian
Hutton, a writer/performer he knew from downtown (Ian will show up in the pages ahead at the
other end of the country). He was close to Dollard pals Rod McArter (Rod will show up in another
hemisphere!) and Stuart McClelland. I always worried when Kirk and Stu roared off in Stu’s loud,
fat-tired hot rod. Since the early days of playing at the Pub, Kirk had made sure to look up guitarist
Andrew Cowan, too. “My fellow Crescent Street virtuoso,” he called Andrew.
Meanwhile something interesting had happened to Gerry as well. Thanks to a conversation
witnessed in an elevator — what are the odds? — he learned about an opening in a very good graphic
and industrial design studio. This studio — Arc, it was called — was the descendant, so to speak, of
an office that had been set up to work on projects for Expo 67. Its principals had all been educated
in top design schools, one in New York, one in Switzerland, one in Rhode Island. The job opening
in question hadn’t been advertised. Arc was hoping to find the successful candidate through word
of mouth.
Gerry looked the company up in the Yellow Pages and presented himself as a candidate. He
explained how it was that he knew about the opening (“I was in an elevator and happened to hear
a headhunter … ”) and, although he was green, compared to the ideal candidate, Arc could see his
talent and his potential, and he got the job. He was thrilled. He knew the work would be interesting
and he knew the Arc discipline and experience would always stand him in good stead.
Kirk left us again. He went back to London to record. He and Trish moved in together. I could tell
from his letters that he was very happy.
Then he was back. With Trish, this time. We could see why he was smitten — she was a beautiful
girl, and we all liked her immediately.
They quickly went back to London. By then Dwight’s girlfriend, Cathy, a Montrealer, was living
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with him in London. Not far away lived Kirk and Trish. The recording sessions continued.
It was during this period that Gerry visited Kirk and Trish in London. Came home and told us
what a great time he’d had.
Then I went to London myself. Patti and Alex held down the fort on Blue Haven while I visited
Mother, who was recuperating from an operation. On one of my afternoons there, Hilda, my old
school friend, who by now was a close friend of Mother’s, visited. And to make the day even more
special, Kirk and Trish called on us. Mother and Hilda and I watched as they walked up the sunlit
double row of ancient chestnut trees in Beddington Park on their way to see us.
“Why, they look like an Edwardian couple,” said Mother, with pride and happiness, as they
got closer. I can still picture them: Trish was wearing a long print skirt, a short velvet jacket, and
tapestry-covered, ankle-high boots. Her curly, shoulder-length hair was loose. Kirk was wearing a
fitted knee-length coat and his hair was as long as hers. That evening the five of us strolled over to
the church where Alex and I were married.
A day or so later Mother and I were invited to Kirk and Trish’s apartment in what had been a
fine old home in Highgate, on the north side of the city. They had a fabulous view to the south and
east over vast swaths of London. The iconic dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral was visible on the horizon,
four or five miles distant. Kirk is as keen on a vista as I am. He handed me the binoculars and guided
my eyes to a sign, only a portion of which was visible. I could make out the letters i-u-m. “What is
it?” I asked. “Wimbledon Stadium,” he said proudly. He’d figured it out on a large-scale map. Exactly
the kind of thing I would have done.
Feeling a chill in the flat, Mother said she’d give them a set of flannel sheets for their bed. I was
reminded, once again, of how generous, broad-minded, and worldly-wise my dear mother was. She
was so unlike so many of her narrow, judgmental — Victorian! — contemporaries.
A weekend near Whitchurch:
I spent a memorable weekend with Kirk and Trish in a five-hundred-year-old thatched cottage
near Whitchurch, in Hampshire. The cottage was adjacent to, and part of the estate of, a huge old
manor house. By tradition it had been the residence of the lord and lady’s cook.
First I’ll tell you about the lady who lived at the cottage: Joan was an older friend of Trish’s from
back in New South Wales. Now in England, she had responded to a job offer in The Lady, a wellknown British publication with a classified-ads section for positions “in service” — butlers, grooms,
chauffeurs, etc. (The Lady recently figured in an episode of Downton Abbey). The job offer: Cook
three days a week for the lord and lady and family at the manor house … in exchange for a salary
and full-time residence in the old cottage (which by then was modern in terms of plumbing and
heating).
But we didn’t see Joan that weekend. Kirk and Trish had use of the cottage because Joan was on
holiday, in Greece, with a man she’d recently met through a dating service. This man, as unbelievable
as this sounds, was quite well known by my mother: he managed the gas company that she did
business with. Of all the millions of Britons …
The flint-walled, thatch-roofed cottage, one of a dozen or so on the estate, was tiny, like a doll’s
house, but very comfortable and welcoming, with two bedrooms upstairs and a cozy kitchen/
dining/sitting-room downstairs. In the garden was a topiaried tree clipped into an ornamental
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shape— a giant rooster, complete with tail and cockscomb. The garden was full of songbirds and
old-fashioned perennial flowering plants that perfumed the air. I felt a powerful surge of nostalgia
for the hills and dales of the England of yore. I felt almost lost in time, down there in Hampshire.
We walked up a narrow, tree-shaded lane toward the manor house, which stood majestically
on a rise overlooking its many acres of paddocks and woodlands, its tennis courts and stables and
other outbuildings. In a little glade Kirk and Trish showed me the pet cemetery. There were dozens
of crosses with names and dates indicating the resting places of the family’s many pets, stretching
back decades, centuries in time. It was all very interesting.
Years later Kirk told me that the Richard Adams novel Watership Down, an adventure story
featuring a small group of rabbits, is set among the very hedgerows and paddocks that he and Trish
and I explored that weekend.
Mother spent that weekend with Hilda and Les, Hilda’s husband, at their place. We had lots to tell
each other, back in Wallington. She loved hearing about my brief stay in “Olde England.”
My holiday came to an end. Another farewell. She was looking much stronger, much more hale
than when I’d arrived, I was happy to note. Her doctor figured my visit had greatly speeded her
post-op recovery, I later heard through Hilda. This brought me much comfort and joy.
At Arc, Gerry met a young Danish graphic designer whose name is Michael Fog. They met the day
after Mik arrived in Montreal from Switzerland, where he’d studied his métier. They were to become
close friends, collaborators, later partners in two design offices. They still work together on occasion
today.
It was soon after they met that the bicycle craze took off. Gerry and Michael had racing bikes
and several times cycled from downtown out to Dollard to spend part of a sunny Saturday or
Sunday afternoon with Patti and Alex and me. A year or two into the craze, Gerry gave Patti her
own “ten-speed” (the shorthand of the day). I remember him explaining the concept of cycling
cadence to her in the driveway. She was thrilled with the bike and the sense of freedom it gave her.
She loved a ride up to nearby Île-Bizard with Michael in the lead and Gerry bringing up the rear.
A number of other friends of Gerry’s stand out in my mind. Thanks to e-mail, I’m still in touch
with two of them from that era: Mitchell Field, the cockney hairdresser who’d moved from inner
London to Montreal in 1967, was always welcome at our table. Tim Harris, the Sydneysider who’d
gone overseas and worked in London before becoming a Montrealer, also in 1967, was likewise
a frequent guest, always happily received. Mitchell and Tim are charming and funny — natural
raconteurs, both of them. And it was always lovely to see gentle Hope Faith White (who could forget
that name?), Mitchell’s girlfriend in those days. Another couple, friends of Ger’s from a later time,
became very close friends of mine and Alex’s, as we’ll see in the pages ahead.
One day in 1974, my sister telephoned and said, “Now I can tell you something I’ve been holding as
a secret since the war.” Well, that got my full attention.
Late in the war, Hazel was with the Wrens (the Women’s Royal Naval Service), stationed in a
place called Bletchley Park, which is between Oxford and Cambridge. She had never told anyone, not
even Mother and Dad and me, the nature of her work there. But when a book called The Ultra Secret
was published, everyone who’d worked at Bletchley Park was released from the strict, permanent
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secrecy to which they’d been sworn. This is what was suddenly public knowledge: It was at Bletchley
Park that the Nazi’s Enigma code was broken. The Enigma decrypts gave the Allies a huge advantage.
The Allies were, in effect, all through the war, reading Hitler’s orders to his commanders in the field,
as if over his shoulder. Winston Churchill reportedly told King George VI, “It was thanks to Ultra
that we won the war.” A historian of British intelligence in World War Two said that Ultra shortened
the war “by not less than two years and probably by four years.”
Hazel had all those months been working (in some clerical capacity) alongside the best and
brightest military and civilian codebreakers. I felt so proud of her when I learned this!
Kirk and Dwight’s eponymously named album, Druick & Lorange, was released. It was well reviewed
by the music press, but by then it represented equal parts satisfaction and frustration to them — with
frustration perhaps shading satisfaction. Further collaboration was put on hold.
There was another reason for shelving further plans: at about the same time, Trish decided to
meet her sister, who’d been working on the Continent, in France, for one last grape harvest, and to
then return with her to their native Australia.
Kirk wound up his business in London and once again came back to Fairview Village.
He was in his mid-twenties now. I could see him weighing his options, pondering his future.
It didn’t take him long to decide: He was going to follow Trish to Australia. His first stop would
be Vancouver, where he’d stay with friends, tend bar, and play and sing until he had enough money
for a one-way ticket to Sydney. There was a deadline: Australia was about to change its immigration
policy — from open-doors, welcome-all, to a much stricter, much more exclusionary regime, a
points system.
We all said our goodbyes. This was a very difficult farewell. I thought of the enormous distance
that would separate us . I pictured the planet, with Montreal and Sydney just about directly opposite
each other. I thought of my parents, wishing me good luck and safe travels when I’d left England
during the war. When will we see him next? I wondered. I almost didn’t dare wonder.
Some weeks later he phoned us with an update: He’d saved enough for the flight. He’d be able to
leave Vancouver in time to get to Australia before the open-door policy ended. But only just: In the
lead-up to the policy change, Qantas and the other airlines serving Sydney were solidly booked. The
only availability was on Christmas Day. He’d be leaving Vancouver on December 25, which meant
he’d be arriving Sydney on December 27. The doors closed at midnight on December 31.
Came his first letter from Down Under. With it was a photograph. There he was, smiling widely,
Trish at his side, her family all around them. It was a bright, sunny day, and they were all dressed
for the heat. trish’s parents’ garden, he’d written on the back of the photo. And, under that,
canberra, new year’s day, 1975.
{ january 1975 – may 1980 }
While Kirk was enjoying his first Southern Hemisphere summer (which must have reminded him
of his childhood in the tropics), we were going through a tough Montreal winter. England, too, was
seeing colder-than-average temperatures and worse-than-usual weather that year.
I took on sewing assignments during those months. I made bridesmaids’ dresses for the wedding
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of a neighbour’s daughter. For another neighbour, a short, barrel-chested Québécois who was an
animator at the National Film Board, I made quite a few smock shirts. I made a couple of safari
jackets for my doctor, a Lancashireman with a good sense of humour.
With the proceeds of these undertakings I booked two tickets to London at Easter. Patti was about
to turn fourteen and hadn’t travelled since I’d taken her to England and Spa at age seven. And
Mother and I deserved a treat after the long winter, I figured.
But on something else I hadn’t figured. On departure day, when Patti and I got out to Dorval
Airport, I suddenly realized that my passport had lapsed a few months before. My heart raced.
But we caught a lucky break: The pretty employee at Air Canada’s check-in counter was flirting
and laughing and exchanging quips with the little knot of attractive young businessmen who were
immediately ahead of Patti and me. Basking in their attention, she was. Head still spinning when
Patti and I quickly stepped up to the counter. She gave our passports a cursory glance, asked us to
set our luggage on the conveyor, and voilà, we were on our way to the gate. Whew!
Hilda and Les were waiting for us at Heathrow — where the weather was hardly better than what
we’d left at Dorval — and they drove us to Mother’s toasty little flat. The five of us enjoyed an evening
of laughing and catching up.
Next day I made straightaway for Canada House on Trafalgar Square to get my passport
renewed. I met with an official, filled out a form, had my photo taken, and so on. When I told the
official that I’d actually entered the kingdom on an expired passport, his waggish response was so
British: “You naughty girl,” he said. And he instructed me to come back the next day to pick up the
new one.
Back at Mother’s we listened to the weather report. The cold was to continue, and snow
was to prevail, well into April. There was no way we were going to twiddle our thumbs indoors
in Wallington, I decided. I called a travel agent to talk about sun destinations. The agent’s first
suggestion was Athens. I couldn’t see us in big, polluted Athens. I told her we were looking to get
away to somewhere small, some off-the-beaten-track destination, preferably as part of a group tour,
to keep everything simple. “My parents always enjoyed their trips with Cosmos Tours,” I said. I was
thinking of Mother and Dad’s two trips to Italy. “Maybe Cosmos has something suitable,” I said.
“I’ll call you back,” she said.
She did call back, and her suggestion sounded perfect. There was a Cosmos group readying to
depart for Ibiza, one of Spain’s Balearic Islands in the western Mediterranean. The hotel was a small
country inn; the room had three beds. Transport from the airport to the inn and back was included.
I’d seen photos of Ibiza in National Geographic, and I remembered how attractive it looked. “Book
us,” I told her.
We asked Hilda if she and Les would drive us to Heathrow. “Of course,” she said.
I went back to Canada House to pick up my new passport.
And within a couple of days we were in the departure lounge, surrounded by other happy sunseekers, listening to the song “Y Viva España” on the public-address system, and getting excited
about a tri-generational holiday.
We flew over France, which was solidly cloaked in cloud. Suddenly we saw the glorious blue of
the Mediterranean. Then little Minorca, then bigger Majorca. Then Ibiza, with its main centre, the
old walled town also called Ibiza, on a rise overlooking a harbour filled with boats. The sun, which
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we hadn’t seen in days, was low in the sky. The shadows were long. The island looked … enchanted.
We landed, the formalities were quickly settled, the red-jacketed Cosmos Tours guide led us to the
hotel bus, and soon we travelling through the soft, scented evening toward our final destination.
Young porters took care of the luggage, the red Cosmos tags of which were coded to specific
rooms. Other porters escorted everyone to their quarters, which were simple but spotless and
perfect for vacationers’ purposes. Ours gave out onto a patio surrounded and shaded by almond
trees just coming into blossom. The beach was just five minutes down the lane, said the porter. We
had a quick supper and turned in. There was a high-spirited wedding reception going on, and that
first night we didn’t sleep as soundly — as profoundly — as we would on the nights that followed.
We spent a lot of time at the beach, which was set up with little tables with parasols. We met a
British couple who ran a little café nearby. They’d been on the island for some years; they told us
which of the bus tours included in our tour were the prettiest and most interesting and shared other
tips.
Momentos culminantes (“highlights”):
We were shown a ruggedly rocky little island off the west coast of the island. “Is Isla Es Vedrà,
where some of the scenes for the musical film South Pacific were photographed,” said our guide with
a charming Spanish accent.
We took a trip aboard a glass-bottomed boat and saw marvellous fish and plants.
We poked around San Antonio, a larger town where we bought comfortable sandals and little
presents for friends back in Canada and England.
We attended a late-afternoon display of Spanish horsemanship at a little bullring. The riders
looked so proud that they almost seemed scornful of their audience of tourists.
That was followed by a barbecue dinner of what was described as suckling pig. The selfappointed comedian of our group took one bite and exclaimed, “Cor! It’s been years since this pig
suckled!” Waiters circled with leather gourds filled with Spanish wine, ready to stream it directly
into upturned open British mouths. They were accompanied by photographers who snapped the
quaffers and quickly made prints that were set out for sale at the conclusion of the evening. Touristy
but fun.
After the suckling pig and the streaming wine came the Spanish dancing. Our Limey cotravellers, convinced they were fluent in the pasa doble, took to the floor with much quickstepping and matador-stomping. Mother and I chaperoned Patti to the downstairs disco, where
the atmosphere was younger and the loud music was … less Iberian. Patti shyly said she’d be happy
just to watch. But when one of the young disco employees grabbed my hand and took me to the
floor and demonstrated the easy moves, and when Mother too moved to her own version of the
beat — when her mother and granny were disco-dancing! — lovely Patti ventured into the gyrating
crowd of young people and enjoyed herself. She’d been coolish, back in Wallington, on the idea of
Ibiza, I forget why, but she thoroughly enjoyed it while we were there.
We visited las salinas, Ibiza’s salt pans, where salt has been produced since the Phoenicians
arrived on the island some twenty-seven centuries ago. The sky was full of swooping swallows that
day, their tiny chirruped messages to each other filling the air.
We wandered through the old walled town, an ancient settlement of cobbled streets and crooked
buildings with brightly painted doors, little shops full of wares and curios — an Aladdin’s trove,
someone said.
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Every day, our tans deepened . Especially Mother’s — she looked like a gypsy by the time we left.
We all felt healthy, relaxed, and recharged, by the end of the stay.
Some of the momentos culminantes were private and personal: every time I spoke Spanish with
the locals I thought to myself, Look at that — eighteen years since I left Latin America and I’ve still got
some Spanish.
Back in Wallington we talked about the happy memories we three gals would share forever. Back at
Dorval Airport Alex told us about all the cold and wind and snow we’d missed. Ah, Ibiza!
There was interesting news from Gerry when we got back. He had joined the team of industrial
and graphic designers who were working on the signage for the 1976 Olympics. Every sign associated
with the Games — from the big, bilingual Welcome to Montreal, Home of the 1976 Summer Olympics
highway signs to the individual row identifiers and seat numbers at the Olympic Stadium — had to
planned and designed. It was a huge task.
Patti was in high school by this point. She was a busy neighbourhood baby-sitter, and she took
on a couple of pocket-money jobs over those years — both of which were within a two-minute
walk of our back door. Where the garden centre had been, a little strip mall now stood. There was
a pharmacy, a grocery, a bookshop, a delicatessen, a post office, a pizzeria, a hairdresser’s salon, a
barbershop, and a Wine Art franchise there (I’ll get back to Wine Art in a sec). It was very handy
having those stores so close by, and two of them were perfect for Patti’s first part-time jobs.
Her first gig, as she put it, was at the bookshop. She loved working there. The owners could see
that she was responsible and organized, and they assigned her more and more tasks. She was always
a big reader, so spending time in a bookstore was a pleasure for her. From there she moved to the
beauty parlour — Salon Blue Haven — where she enjoyed the camaraderie and was a shampoo girl.
Caesar’s Palace, a huge roller-skating arena, was built, up near Fairview Shopping Centre. Patti
and her pals spent lots of time there. She saw friends from her own school and met kids from other
schools too, up there. Dollard-des-Ormeaux was and still is very ethnically diverse and the arena
was in a sense a mini Dollard. It was good exercise, too, skating round and round!
In another local sports arena she was injured. Not badly, but badly enough to give me a scare
and her a scar. And she hadn’t even been playing — she’d been a spectator, at the hockey rink a few
streets away from the house.
I got a call from her friend Gilles: “Uh, Madame Lorange, this is Gilles, uh, Patti … ”
“Is she all right, Gilles?”
“It was a puck, Madame Lorange, a puck, uh … ”
“Is her face all right, Gilles?”
“Her forehead, uh … ”
Alex and I were in the car and at the rink faster than you could say “slap shot.” The puck had
left the ice and clipped her across the eyebrow, which was bleeding profusely. We got her up to the
Lakeshore General’s emergency department, where she bravely took ten stitches. It could have been
so much worse, everyone agreed.
Kirk was in the Antipodes. Gerry was downtown. Patti was busy with school, part-time jobs, and
growing interests outside the home. Alex, now in his sixties, was working hard, putting money aside
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for retirement. With my fifty-fifth birthday on the near horizon, I decided in 1975 to go back to work.
It had been a long time since my days at Boots the Chemist and my adventures as a switchboard
operator, but I was ready to rejoin the work force.
A quick word here about Quebec in the late 1970s. I said at the top of this chapter that these memoirs
aren’t the place to hash over Quebec politics, but I must say a bit about them at this point. You’ll see
why in a few paragraphs.
In 1976, the Parti Québécois was voted into office. The PQ’s politics were “sovereigntist,” according
to its supporters (“We want a sovereign country”), “separatist,” according to its pro–Canadian unity
detractors (“They want to separate Quebec from Canada”). With dissent brewing, dozens of companies
that had been headquartered in Montreal, large and small, left — left Montreal to re-establish themselves
where the political climate was more stable. And in those companies’ wake went thousands, soon tens
of thousands, of English-speaking Montrealers. And quickly Montreal lost its status as Canada’s key
metropolis, its economic engine. When we’d arrived in Montreal from Belgium in 1963, it held that
distinction. By the late ’seventies Toronto held it (the Parti Québécois did great things for Toronto,
someone said). And as soon as it was in power, the PQ got busy drafting laws pertaining to language.
For a short time I worked two evenings a week and Saturdays at the Wine Art store in the little mall
behind the house. I learned about making wine and beer from kits, a popular hobby, and sold the
kits and other products to customers both English and French. Discussing distilling and fermenting
in French didn’t exactly come naturally, but I managed!
The Wine Art experience gave me the self-confidence I needed to apply for another job.
A few houses away from us lived my friend Pat Kerridge, another Brit, who worked in Admitting
at the Lakeshore General Hospital, which serves the mainly English-speaking population of the
section of Greater Montreal known as the West Island. One day Pat told me there was an opening in
Medical Records. “Medical Records is kind of like a lending library,” she said. “Doctors and nurses
borrow medical charts; Medical Records makes sure the charts are returned, and keeps them all
properly filed and up to date.” I’d kind of intuited all that. She added: “And there’s an opening there.
Why don’t you apply?”
I did apply, and I got the job. I got through the interview, even the parts that were in French. But
here’s the thing: After the Parti Québécois passed their Bill 101, La charte de la langue française, all
public sector employees, hospital workers among them, had to speak much better French than I did.
There was a grandfather clause — I wouldn’t lose my job. But if I’d applied after Bill 101, I would not
have been hired.
So there were Pat and I, on the same shift, travelling back and forth in her car between Fairview
Village and the Lakeshore General. The two Pats, sharing gasoline expenses, enjoying each other’s
company. Eight a.m. to 4:00 p.m. on weekends and holidays, we worked in those days, with the
occasional double shift in cases of emergency or staff illness. Those doubles made for long, tough
days, of course, but I enjoyed the fatter paychecks they generated.
For the first and only time in my life I belonged to a union (which — yes! oui! — would later in
life bring me an additional pension beyond Old Age Security and the Quebec Pension Plan).
I scheduled my 1976 days off to coincide with house guests’ visits. My sister, Hazel, and her husband,
Morris, stayed with us for a couple of days during the Olympics. Mother came a bit later. Edie’s
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daughter-in-law Peggy kindly chauffeured Mother and me around. One day we went to Upper
Canada Village, in Ontario, a replica of an early pioneer settlement. It was a gorgeous day and
the three of us had a great time. A day or two later Mother and Alex and I went to the little town
of Hudson, just off the Island of Montreal, to visit Alex’s cousin Thelma. Alex and I had roomed
and boarded with Thelma and her husband, Ken, in the city when Alex had come home from the
war. I took us all out to dinner at The Willows Inn, a Hudson landmark overlooking Lake of Two
Mountains, where ferries ply back and forth between Hudson and the village of Oka. Mother and
Thelma hadn’t seen each other since September 1950, when Mother had visited Alex and me and
the boys in New York and we’d all driven up to Quebec. Dinner at The Willows was a lovely way to
celebrate the reunion.
Labour Day came; Mother went home; I started taking on more and more shifts at the hospital.
Months then years passed. In 1980 I went full-time. I bought a little secondhand Honda Civic
hatchback. My sense of independence was complete. By then I was on the 4:00 p.m. to midnight
shift, weeknights only. Sometimes Alex and I would meet on my hour-long dinner break at Le
Manoir, a steakhouse we liked that happened to be close to the hospital.
An unforeseen consequence of my going back to work was Alex’s return to tennis. He hadn’t
played since we’d lived in Havana, but now he joined a tennis club, played often and regularly, got
on the club ladder in his age category, and enjoyed it immensely.
Update on the kids:
Gerry had by the late 1970s worked in a number of design offices, freelanced, worked as a
bartender while freelancing, founded a design office with three partners, left that partnership,
freelanced again, worked in typesetting (before the advent of personal computers this was a
specialized area), and begun to work in advertising agencies, where he was both art director and
copywriter. The very first project he ever wrote the copy for won an important prize at an advertising
awards show, which more or less established his bona fides as someone who works with words as
well as with visuals.
From 1975 through 1978, Kirk and Trish lived in Clovelly, near Bondi Beach, Sydney, in a little
rented house with a garden. From there they moved up to Newport, on a peninsula in the lovely
northern suburbs, to another rented house. This one overlooked the Pacific and was modern,
shipshape, and very interesting. In bustling Sydney Kirk was making a name for himself as a session
guitarist, working on albums, radio commercials, and the soundtracks of movies. He was loving
Australia. The informal, laid-back atmosphere suited him well.
In 1978 Patti graduated from John Rennie High School, Kirk’s old alma mater. She spent that
summer working in customer service at Simpson’s at Fairview Shopping Centre, again following
(not deliberately) in Kirk’s footsteps. In the fall she went to John Abbott College in Sainte-Anne-deBellevue, at the western tip of the Island of Montreal.
For a little while the Lorange household was an empty nest. Feeling unfulfilled at John Abbott, Patti
returned to her job at Simpson’s. Bored at Simpson’s, she went out west. She’s got Kirk’s itchy feet, I
thought. Her high school friend Cliff Davies and two mutual friends had moved to Edmonton; they
were looking for a fourth roommate; Patti volunteered. That situation didn’t hold her attention for
long, and soon she was back — back on Blue Haven, back at Simpson’s. Alex and I were delighted to
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welcome her home and have her under our roof once again.
We were delighted anew when she landed a job that she enjoyed more. At the Mirabel Racquet
Club, which is just across the street from Fairview Shopping Centre, she took on the duties of
receptionist and tournament coordinator. The director of the club thought the world of her and she
felt respected and appreciated there.
Big news arrived from New South Wales: Trish was pregnant! Kirk was about to become a father,
Alex and I were about to become grandparents! Little Danny was born. Kirk and Trish made plans
to come to Canada when he was a bit older. In preparation for their visit I went ahead and had a
shower and toilet installed downstairs to make a proper guest suite of that bedroom.
On the road with mater:
Mother came again. I scheduled my holiday to coincide with her visit. I had my own car now, so
she and I were totally independent of everyone else’s schedule.
I wanted to show her Cable House, a b&b that Alex and I had discovered and enjoyed in Cape
Ann, Massachusetts, near the New Hampshire state line. I thought the owner-innkeeper, Melissa,
and Mother would enjoy each other’s company, as they were about the same age and were both wise
and insightful. I thought Mother would enjoy the history of the inn. In an earlier time it had been
the house of the paymaster of the company that laid the first transatlantic telegraph cable.
The drive through New England, just the two of us, lots of reminiscing, was great fun. Mother
loved all the English place names. And she loved Cable House — Melissa had thoughtfully moved
upstairs and made her own ground-floor bedroom available to Mother — and quaint Cape Ann.
The old shipbuilding town is very strict about its architecture, its signs, and preventing commercial
blight. It’s pretty from every angle, a favourite haunt of painters and photographers.
Mother spotted the little white-washed, geranium-bedecked church and suggested we attend
Sunday service, which we did. After the service, before leaving the church, everyone shook hands
and chatted. Old friends and strangers, locals and visitors. It was lovely. Mother was very touched by
this. Back home she’d been attending Beddington Church for fifty-odd years. She was a longstanding
member of the choir, which was the old church’s key fundraising arm.
Melissa and Mother and Melissa and I exchanged Christmas cards thereafter. And once when
Alex and I were visiting a number of friends in Florida, we called on Melissa at a retirement centre
in Venice, Florida, and spent part of an afternoon with her. At some point, I forget when, some kind
soul wrote to everyone on her Christmas card list to let us all know that Melissa had left us.
By the hearth with mater:
Mother was to visit one more time. It was her one and only Christmas in Canada. “I knew it was
cold in Canada, but I never knew it was this cold. The cold penetrates to your very heart here,” she
said (as if I hadn’t noticed!). As I write this I think of a song lyric of Kirk’s: “How do you feel at ease
/ When the wind can freeze your breath away.”
On this visit, we stayed indoors and enjoyed festive meals and the company of family and
friends. Several of Patti’s and Ger’s friends joined us to celebrate the season. Another lyric from the
same song (“Montréal,” it’s called): “Montréal in wintertime / You don’t go out, you stay at home.”
Mother urged me to plan for retirement in Victoria, British Columbia, where she knew the
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winters are mild. “And it’s British, dear,” she added. Alex and I had in fact been discussing this
question — Where to live after we retire? — quite a bit. We’ll revisit it in the pages ahead.
After her stay with us she spent a week with Hazel and her family in Ontario. Then she flew back
to England from Toronto, never to return to this continent.
Alex and I meet our first grandchild:
Kirk and Trish and little Danny, shy, not quite a year old, arrived at Easter 1979. They moved into
the recently plumbed guest suite and stayed three months, a lovely long visit.
It started with a scare. Danny arrived with a persistent little cough. He’d had it, said Kirk and
Trish, since he’d almost choked on a mouthful of food at his Australian grandmother’s house, a few
days before they’d travelled. A number of days, in other words, and the cough simply wouldn’t ease.
Also, his appetite was lacking and he wasn’t his usual colour. At work at the hospital, I described the
situation to a woman I knew quite well, a Chinese pediatrician. She listened carefully and told me
that to be on the safe side we should take Danny to the Montreal Children’s Hospital for a checkup.
We wasted no time taking him to the Children’s emergency department. After a long wait we
saw a doctor. He was a huge African man. He was gentle and caring, but his little patient was quite
terrified of him. He examined Danny and ordered a set of x-rays. These revealed that there was a
small article lodged in Danny’s lung. It was removed by means of an instrument that combined a
tiny light, a tiny camera, and a tiny vacuum. This device was threaded down poor little Danny’s
throat and into his lung (after anaesthesia, of course). The offending item was a seed from wholegrain bread. He was kept overnight in a steam-filled environment at the hospital. He was so pleased
to see his parents the next morning! Almost as soon as they picked him up, he began to regain his
usual complexion. And his appetite quickly returned. Kirk and Trish were greatly relieved. We all
were.
He got used to the house; he loved playing in the garden; we took little outings to parks where
there were other kids; and so on. All was well again. It was wonderful to see Kirk and Trish so happy
and proud.
The climax of the visit was the memorable moment when in our long kitchen, amid much
laughter, Danny learned to walk. A true milestone event, and I was there to witness it with Kirk
and Trish. Very special. For Danny too, of course — the plain-to-see boost to his sense of self was a
delight to behold.
The three months flew by. On the appointed day, we drove them to Dorval Airport, and they
flew back to the other side of the earth. Minus one pesky little seed.
In early 1980, Alex learned from a friend of his, a businessmen and a regular opponent at the West
Island Tennis Club, that an interesting position was about to open up.
m&r, a manufacturer of plastic packages in Laval, just north of Montreal, required a comptroller.
The company was new, and growing by leaps and bounds. Its directors had heard about Alex’s
experience with Uniroyal (from his tennis club friend) and they were interested in speaking with
him about the job. It was a short, pleasant interview, he later said, and he was hired on the spot. It
was the post he enjoyed most since his Uniroyal days. And he was to hold it until he retired, eight
years later. Nice to finish on a high note.
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A reconnoitering trip to B.C.:
For years, mostly because of the political situation in the province, property values had stagnated
in Quebec vis-à-vis the rest of the country. We’d been talking about retiring to British Columbia,
where, conversely, property values had been steadily climbing for years.
In ’eighty, right after Alex went to m&r, we saw a bit of an uptick in Quebec real estate. It triggered
a little tremor of optimism in us. Maybe we should start planning our move to the West Coast, I
thought. Maybe I should go out there (it was too early in the m&r chapter for Alex to take a holiday),
take a look around, get a feel for where we might like to live and what a condo there might cost.
Maybe I should became I shall. I arranged to fly to Vancouver. Kirk and Patti each had a friend
there who had enjoyed my cooking and hospitality in times gone by. I didn’t hesitate in contacting
them and asking for minor favours.
I travelled in May. Kirk’s pal Ian Hutton met me at the airport. Together we went into the city.
Patti’s friend John Isles met us for lunch and drove us around Vancouver. The two of them pointed
out the sights and gave me a bit of local history. It’s a beautiful city, of course — the sea, the mountains,
the parks — and it was a thrill to be there, especially on a gorgeous May day.
I stayed at John’s that night. Next morning, he drove me to the bus terminal where I boarded
a bus for Victoria — a bus ride that included a ferry ride. Isn’t this exciting, I thought. The ferry ride
was magnificent. Mount Baker, the snow-covered peak in Washington state, was visible from the
Strait of Georgia, looming over the landscape. Every now and then, the public address system would
draw passengers’ attention to dolphins, seals, a pair of whales, even. The highlight of the crossing
was S-shaped Active Pass, between Mayne and Galiano islands. It’s just wide enough for a westbound ferry to pass an east-bound sister ship. Eagles perch on trees that overlook the narrow. The
shifting vistas of islands and channels are fascinating. Best of all: the ferry blasts a four-note signal
on its enormous horns — the first four notes of “O Canada” — to warn oncoming traffic, as it enters
the pass. This is grand! I thought. I want to be a British Columbian, not a Quebecker.
{ june 1980 – april 1985 }
A date with a brain surgeon:
Tuesday, June 24, 1980, was undoubtedly Alex’s and my worst day as parents. And it ushered in
what was surely our most stressful month since the war. It was Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day, an important
holiday in Quebec, the last day of a four-day weekend.
Our anguish began when I answered an early-morning call from Jane Lewis, Gerry’s girlfriend.
She was phoning from his bedside at the Montreal Neurological Hospital, she said. He’d been
admitted the previous afternoon with a cerebral aneurysm; he would have to undergo brain surgery.
Her news hit me like a bomb. I shared it with Alex. His face lost every vestige of colour. I thought he
was going to faint as he collapsed on the sofa. I turned back to Jane, got Gerry’s room number, and
told her we’d be there as soon as possible.
He looked very pale and worn with worry when we walked into his room, but he put on a brave
smile to keep us calm, and we all remained as cheerful and optimistic as possible.
He was able to talk about the events that had led him there. On the Sunday afternoon he’d been
in Old Montreal when a sudden, violent headache had struck. He’d gone home and gone to bed after
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taking the maximum number of aspirins that the package instructions allowed. The headache had
persisted nonetheless. Sleep had been elusive, just about nonexistent. He’d taken more aspirins. On
the Monday, he’d gotten up, showered and shaved, and noticed something odd: Although he could
put his lips together and whistle, he couldn’t whistle a tune. Normally he was a great whistler. “It’s as
if the tunes simply vanished,” he said. He knew something was very wrong inside his cranium. He
walked from his apartment to the nearby Royal Victoria Hospital emergency department. When at
the triage desk they’d heard his presenting symptoms, he was transferred from the Royal Vic to the
Montreal Neurological Hospital, an affiliated institution across the street.
There he’d undergone various high-technology tests and been told that he had an avm — an
arteriovenous malformation — within his brain, and that it had burst. The flow would have to be
staunched with devices known as Heifetz clips. For the moment, and for the ten days that followed,
he was to be kept as calm as possible (for the first few days only Jane and Alex and I were allowed
to visit, and only briefly). This in an effort to bring the blood pressure inside his skull (which was
checked every fifteen minutes) down as low as possible prior to operating. Those were the longest ten
days of my life. The good news was that the rupture was in an area — the right temporal zone — that
was relatively easy to access.
The night before the operation, Jane slept at Gerry’s apartment so that Alex and I could sleep at
hers, allowing us all to be at the Neuro early the next morning.
At dawn on the day of the op his head was shaved. Shortly after that he was wheeled past Jane
and Alex and me on his way to the OR. Whether the three of us looked worried sick or not I don’t
know, but he brightened our mood when he sang out, Broadway-baritone style, “I’ve got a date with
a brain surgeon … ”
Eight or so hours later, we met with intense, dark-eyed Dr. André Olivier, the surgeon in
question. The operation had gone well, he said. There was every reason to believe that Gerry would
recover without problems. We had no words to thank him, but our tears of joy told the story. The
procedures had taken seven hours, all told. An opening had been cut into his skull, above his right
ear. The blood that had leaked out into his brain was removed. Three titanium Heifetz clips had
been inserted and adjusted through the opening. And the piece of his skull that had been removed
had been re-attached.
“Were you standing, those seven hours? Uninterrupted?” Alex asked Dr. Olivier.
“Yessir, I was,” he said. He was all-business, no small talk. Later we learned that to relax he plays
jazz trumpet. This endeared him — even further — to Alex.
Gerry spent time in the intensive care unit and in the evening was taken back to his room. There
we saw him. He was sporting a huge bandage about the head. And a week’s worth of whiskers. He
was thinner than he’d ever been as an adult. I kept repeating Dr. Olivier’s words to myself — There’s
every reason to believe that he’ll recover without problems.
He stayed another three weeks at the Neuro. More high-tech tests were carried out. He regained
his appetite. Under his bandage his skull was repairing itself. Jane and Alex and I disguised our
shock when it was removed: The three-sided “flap” of his scalp that had been peeled away to reveal
his skull had been re-attached with forty-odd stitches. Their tied-off ends stuck out beyond the
scarring incision line and his eighth-inch-long hair. But: He was walking about now; lapping the
halls arm-in-arm with Jane; taking the sun on the deck at the south end of the ward; watching field
hockey games at McGill Stadium, right below his window; cracking jokes (“I’ve been up at the
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Neuro getting open-minded”); chatting with his fellow patients; reading — he was recuperating.
And he was now allowed more visitors. Alex and I met a number of them. It was at his bedside
that we met his friends Derek and Monique Lepper. Derek, a Brit, was a freelance photographer. He
and Monique, an Air Canada flight attendant whose family was from Belgium, were to become very
close friends of mine and Alex’s. They would visit us often on Blue Haven and, as we’ll see in the
next chapter, elsewhere.
On the day of his discharge, Gerry walked back home. He took comfort, some difficult-to-define
solace, from the fact that he lived at the time on Dr. Penfield Avenue. It was Dr. Wilder Penfield who
in 1934 founded the hospital where Ger had just spent a month.
Trish during this period had been pregnant with their second child. We hadn’t told Kirk and
her about Gerry’s situation, for fearing of upsetting her. We’d also shielded Patti from the worst of
it. Later she said that Alex and I had kept up such a steady stream of optimism — to mask the dread
in our hearts — that she hadn’t realized how serious it had been until it was in the past.
Jane throughout the ordeal was a true-blue trooper: brave, supportive, caring. I never saw her
dispirited and I’m sure Gerry didn’t either.
Gerry called Kirk after he’d been home a day or two. He asked him if he was sitting down. Kirk
said he was. “I’ve got some news that will shock you,” he said. “I’ve just recovered from a successful
brain operation.” Kirk assumed this was another of Gerry’s gags and burst out laughing. But within
a few minutes he believed Ger, and he too was feeling the tremendous relief we all felt.
Gerry regained the ability to whistle tunes, by the way. The burst blood vessel had compromised
the area of the brain that deals with patterns. In the days leading up to the operation he hadn’t been
able to read, either, because his brain didn’t recognize the shapes of words. And reading one syllable
at a time was nothing but tiresome and frustrating. After the op, pattern recognition was restored;
reading was as it had been before the event; and his brain found anew the tunes that had, for a time,
vanished.
Kirk and Trish, Down Under in New South Wales, had two visitors from Dollard-des-Ormeaux
around that time.
Kirk had been corresponding with Rod McCarter. The two of them had been fast friends when
Kirk lived under our roof and Rod lived with his parents just three or four blocks away. Kirk had
painted such a vivid and attractive picture of Australia that Rod flew there for a holiday. Within
days of his arrival he was in love with the place. So much so that he visited the Sydney branch of
the high-tech company he worked for in Canada and described his track record and his desire to
transfer within the firm, Ottawa to Sydney. The executives who interviewed him thought he’d be the
perfect addition to their office. And within a year he’d emigrated and bought a house, a lovely house
with a lovely view, not far from where his old pal Kirk lived.
And Patti went to visit Kirk and see Sydney for herself as well. She was the first of the Loranges
to go. She was twenty at the time. It was with an anxious heart that I watched her plane take off. Will
she too fall in love with an Australian, will she too emigrate to the other side of the world, I wondered.
I needn’t have worried: She loved seeing Kirk and Trish, she was proud to be the first of the family
to make the trip, but she was a homebody at heart. “Australia’s not for me,” she said, when we picked
her up at the airport. “It’s too far away from you!”
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In 1981, Alex and I, still thinking about our retirement and our exit from Quebec, flew to Vancouver.
We arrived on a beautiful sunny day, rented a car, and drove around the city. This was Alex’s first
experience of British Columbia, and the sight of the Coast Range Mountains looming up behind the
skyscrapers was a wonderful introduction. We had breakfast at Cloud Nine, a revolving restaurant
high above the city, and admired the breathtaking views. We felt so happy, so lucky to live in a
country that includes this, we said as we gestured toward the vistas. Montreal seemed very far away.
The ferry ride to Victoria was just as exciting for me the second time, and I loved watching
Alex marvel during the crossing. I wanted to follow the coast road into Victoria, so we turned
off the aptly named Patricia Bay Highway at Cordova Bay and drove through one beautiful little
community after another — Cadbora Bay, Oak Bay, McNeill Bay, Ross Bay — as lovely parks and
homes and gardens vied for our attention. To our left were the San Juan Islands. In the distance
towered snow-capped Mount Baker. We rounded a corner, and there was the little city of Victoria,
the majestic Empress Hotel presiding over the harbour. We joined the crowds of tourists. Alex took
a photo of me in front of a statue of another Cook — Captain James Cook, the eighteenth-century
explorer. He asked a couple of young girls passing by if they’d take a photo of the two of us. “We just
got married,” he joked. I’m looking at that photo now, remembering how the girls giggled, no doubt
thinking we looked a bit old to be on our honeymoon.
We visited the renowned Butchart Gardens. We spent a whole day in the Royal British Columbia
Museum and learned a lot about the First Peoples and the early history of the province. We found
the totem poles particularly interesting.
Another day we crossed the Juan de Fuca Strait aboard a ferry known as the Black Ball Express.
We got off at the little Washington State town of Port Angeles. Rising up behind the port are the
Olympic Mountains. We couldn’t resist their draw: We took a zigzagging route up to a place called
Hurricane Ridge. The last couple of kilometres were in cloud, but when we reached the ridge the
cloud lifted — to our delight — and we were treated to views of nearby peaks, the Strait, and Victoria.
Back in Victoria we contacted Frank and Pat Sutton. Frank, a friend of a friend and a real estate
agent, showed us a number of condos, some of them very similar to ones I’d seen on my earlier visit.
We had dinner with them; they talked in general terms about living in British Columbia.
Our little holiday, our little stay in this western paradise, had to come to an end, as we were
both still working. We ferried back to the mainland, returned our car, and flew back home, back to
Dollard-des-Ormeaux. But from that trip forward we talked ever more frequently about making
British Columbia our next, our final, home.
Visitors from far and near:
Trish’s parents, Shirley and Jack, visited us that fall. They’d been touring Europe after Jack had
retired from his government job in Canberra, and were taking the long way home so that they
could see a bit of Canada. They spent a few days with us and we showed them a bit of Montreal. We
took them to High Mass at Notre-Dame Cathedral. Very impressive. We took them to Hudson and
visited our old friends the Kirbys. In Hudson, Jack took photos of squirrels. Kangaroos and koalas
and quokkas he was used to; squirrels got his attention! Their itinerary from Montreal was Ottawa–
Vancouver–Sydney (with, in those days, a refueling stop in Hawaii or Fiji). Shirley became a pen pal;
we enjoyed hearing from one another.
Eleanor Prince, a dear friend from the Caracas years, came up from Naples, Florida. She was a
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widow now, and it was her first trip to Canada. The weather was perfect for a drive to Quebec City,
where we stayed at the splendid Château Frontenac, overlooking the St. Lawrence (“the mighty St.
Lawrence,” as the guidebook writers put it). On the way back we stopped at Château Montebello,
site of many a political conference and said to be the world’s largest building made of logs. When
she left us we promised we’d visit when we next found ourselves in Florida.
Jack had retired, and Edie and he had moved to Carlton Place, Ontario, which is just west of
Ottawa. I certainly missed having her just across Blue Haven Drive, but we managed to see each
other often. I’d drive up on my own, and Alex and I would sometimes go together for the day; and
they were often in Montreal visiting their children and grandchildren. I remember Edie visiting
with her grandson Ross and him sitting in the little niche alongside the fireplace. Now he’s made his
last tour with the Canadian Army in Afghanistan and has been awarded a medal for bravery. How
swiftly those years flew by!
In October 1981, Hilda — my old school friend from back in 1939, later a close friend of my
mother — called to say that Mother was in hospital waiting to undergo a serious operation (it wasn’t
cancer, thank heavens). I flew to England immediately. Hilda’s husband met me at the airport and
drove me to the hospital. Mother was pale but she perked up when she saw me. She was worried
about her will, she told Hilda and me. She’d changed it a number of times; now she wanted to
rewrite and have it notarized. We told her we’d help her with that, and we did. The operation was
performed, without complications; still, it was some time before she was to be discharged. Hilda
and I decided to busy ourselves during that time and put Mother’s apartment in good order before
she got home —a new blind on the kitchen window, a new kitchen countertop, a top-to-bottom
cleaning and organizing. This all took a few days. We were exhausted and giggly by the time we
finished. It was Guy Fawkes Night; there were fireworks all around; we went out for fish and chips
and giggled some more. I visited Mother shortly before she went home. She was much stronger, and
in excellent spirits. But my return flight was drawing nigh. I left her in Hilda’s capable care, knowing
that her will and her apartment were in shipshape order.
A reconnoitering trip to the Sunshine State:
I had asked Frank Sutton to keep me apprised of condo prices in Victoria. We watched them
continue to rise as we saw the prices of West Island houses like ours continue to languish. We were
beginning to despair of ever moving out west. We might have to stay in Quebec and spend our
winters in Florida, we were now thinking. What would that be like; what would it cost? we wondered.
A number of friends from the Uniroyal days, friends with whom we were still in touch via
Christmas cards and the occasional phone call, had retired to Florida. So had some couples that
we’d met in ddo. Let’s go visit them and get a feel for how it would be to winter there, we said.
In late March 1982, we packed Alex’s car and headed south. The first old friends we called on
were Cirilo and Lilli Villaverde, in Miami Springs. They were Cuban; we’d met them back in Mexico
City and hadn’t seen them for thirty-plus years. We all hugged and told each other, You haven’t
changed a bit! We caught up: stories about our Uniroyal postings after Mexico and about former
colleagues; stories about retirement (theirs) and retirement plans (ours); stories about our families.
One of their stories about family stands out vividly in my mind: While they were posted in
Caracas, their daughter met a Swiss lawyer who worked for Shell Oil in that city. They fell in love;
they married; they had two children and were very happy — until she discovered he was having an
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affair with his secretary. She was heartbroken. Both sets of parents were furious and insisted he end
the relationship immediately. However: when the paramour learned that the illicit romance had
come to an end, she went to the lawyer’s office, pulled a gun out of her purse … and shot him dead.
The tragedy left all four parents bitterly regretting that their offspring had ever met. Cirilo and Lilli
had a hard time recounting the dreadful episode.
We called on another Cuban couple in the Miami area. Carlos Bustamente had worked closely
with Alex at the Havana plant. He and his wife invited us and the Villaverdes for dinner. Talk of
retirement to Florida with these two couples was tinged by bitterness over a historical fact: if the
Cuban Revolution hadn’t taken place, these four would have lived out their days in Havana. Their
assessments of our plans weren’t really helpful to us, weren’t quite germane, we realized. But we
were enjoying seeing various Greater Miami communities.
We crossed the state on the Everglades Parkway, colloquially known as Alligator Alley, to visit
Eleanor Prince in her elegant gated retirement centre in posh Naples, on Florida’s Gulf Coast. Her
home and garden were beautiful, as I knew they would be. “You look well,” I said, as we entered.
“Hell, I look like a wrinkled old pocketbook,” she said, using the American term for handbag. The
first thing I noticed in her living room was her painting of Mount Ávila, which I’d so admired in
her Caracas apartment. It was fun to see her in her natural habitat, but we could see that Naples was
strictly for the very wealthy, whether as owners or as visiting northern “snowbirds.”
Then we visited Melissa, the former innkeeper at Cable House in Cape Ann, Massachusetts. She
had sold the inn and retired to Venice, also on the Gulf Coast. She lived in another gated retirement
centre, in a little house on a canal by the sea. Very attractive, it was. She asked about Mother —they
had met when Mother and I stayed at Cable House some years previous — and was pleased to hear
that she was well and in good spirits.
On to Sarasota we went, to visit Jean and Jeff Hale. We’d known the Hales on the West Island. It
was at their country place that we watched the 1969 moon landing on television, I remember. Their
unit in their retirement community was also on a canal. Of all the communities we’d seen, this was
the one we could best picture ourselves spending winters in. We took a number of photos and asked
in general terms about rental rates.
And from there, via the gloriously named Sunshine Skyway, we drove north to visit more old
friends. In Tarpon Springs, a port founded by Greek-American sponge fishermen, we reconnected
with Gene Daley. Gene was the former general manager of the Mexico City plant. His son and
Gerry had taken their first steps together on the Daleys’ patio. In Tarpon Springs we also saw Alan
and Jean Krause. We hadn’t seen them since the Havana days. In Deland we saw Dolph and Bernice
Veatch. It was Dolph who recruited Alex away from Dominion Rubber and into U.S. Rubber in
1946. It was thanks to him, in other words, that we’d lived all the overseas adventures. We reminisced
with the Veatches, brought them up to date on the Canada years, told them about all the former
colleagues we’d just visited, and about our plans and hopes for retirement.
We left the Veatches, and Florida, and began the drive north. We now had a mental picture of
what wintering in the Sunshine State would be like and knew more or less what it would entail.
We talked — for mile after mile — about the pros and cons of becoming snowbirds and renting in
Florida during the worst months in Montreal. We much preferred the idea of selling the Blue Haven
house and buying a condo in British Columbia, but we allowed that Florida was a solution we could
live with. But we quietly hoped we wouldn’t have to.
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A highlight of that northward journey: Very near Reading, Pennsylvania, we stopped for the
night. An acquaintance of ours lived in Reading. On a whim, I picked up the local phone book and
looked for Mignon, Claude. There was only one in the book. I dialled the number. He picked up. “Hi,
Claude,” I said. “It’s Pat Lorange, Gerry and Kirk’s mother.” He was amazed — astonished — to hear
my voice. He’d been one of the boys’ close friends in Spa, almost twenty years earlier. I’m sure I was
at the very bottom of the list of callers he expected to hear from that night. He and his wife — we’d
never met her, of course — came right over to the motel where Alex and I were staying; we had a
lovely couple of hours of remembering and catching up.
Update on the kids:
In 1983 Gerry managed to take a month off — he was an advertising agency art director during
those years — and, following in Patti’s footsteps, flew to the Land Down Under (as the song title
has it), to visit Kirk and Trish in Newport Beach, just north of Sydney. By then Danny’s brother
Rohan, our second grandchild, was a toddler. Ger said that Rohan triggered memories — of toddler
Kirky — that he’d lost, totally forgotten. He loved those memories, and he loved Australia.
The following year, his romance with Jane ended. He did some more travelling: He and his
friend Peter Lebensold, who lives in Toronto, met in New York and flew to London. They spent a few
days there, then took the train and ferry to Paris. He’d been there, and elsewhere in France, recently,
with Jane, and he was keen to go back. “I’ve become a Francophile,” he said. He and Peter spent time
in Paris and in the southwest corner of the country, which they loved.
Patti at about this time was delighted with her work situation. She’d landed a job as receptionist
at chom, Montreal’s top English-language rock radio station. But, to her delight, she didn’t last long
as a full-time receptionist. Her bosses quickly noticed that she has a great sense of humour and is
never at a loss for words. They realized she had what it takes to be an on-air announcer and soon she
was making occasional “appearances” on the morning man’s show. Before long she was the morning
traffic reporter. Then she was the drive-home show traffic reporter.
Then came her big break. When Terry Dimonte began as the new host of the morning show,
chom put her on as his cohost. The two of them immediately built up a great friendship and an
enormous listenership. The show’s numbers were huge — tens of thousands of Montrealers loved to
listen to their 5:30-to-9:00 banter and repartee. It was a hard shift with an early reveille — especially
hard in winter — but when she began cohosting she got a raise, and she knew she’d found her
field. She and Terry became Montreal personalities. A number of times I was with her, in stores or
restaurants or whatever, and someone would recognize her voice and say, “You’re Peppermint Patti,
aren’t you?” (She’d acquired that handle early on — “And now here’s Peppermint Patti at the traffic
desk” — and it had stuck.) My daughter the celeb! Oh! Then there was the time she brought two fans
from Hollywood home for Thanksgiving dinner. William Friedkin, the Academy Award–winning
director of The French Connection and the terrifying The Exorcist, was in Montreal making a film.
He enjoyed Terry and Patti’s morning show so much that he called chom and said he wanted to
meet them. They did all meet. Actor Miguel Ferrer, son of Oscar winner José Ferrer and crooner
Rosemary Clooney, was at that meeting too. And didn’t Patti invite the three of them to her mother’s
house for a home-cooked Thanksgiving feast! And didn’t they all accept! So I can honestly say here
that I’ve served turkey and all the trimmings to an Oscar winner.
Kirk, on the other side of the planet, was perfecting his proficiency as a musician. He was doing
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session work — he was one of Sydney’s busiest recording session guitarists. His playing was heard
on the soundtracks of a number of Australian films. He was playing live gigs. And he was working
on No Apostrophe, an album of his own original material. All this while fathering two little boys.
In 1983, Alex and I booked a European holiday. It began in England. We were met at Heathrow by
my school friend Hilda and her husband Les. They drove us to Wallington, where we picked up
Mother, then to their home, where we were all overnight guests. Next day Alex rented a car and we
drove to Bletchingley, where we’d booked rooms at the White Hart Inn. There we were just a few
miles from Copthorne, where during the war we’d lived on the farm with Winnie and Charlie. The
inn is very old, with crooked passages, uneven floors, narrow stairs, and low door frames marked
duck or grouse. Some of its posts and beams reputedly date back to the time of the Spanish
Armada (1588, all you history buffs). Mother stayed at Hilda and Les’s while we stayed at the inn, but
Hilda and Mother joined us for several meals, and they often enjoyed the inn’s gardens while Alex
and I explored the area and got reacquainted with Copthorne’s high street.
One of the highlights of our jaunts was a lovely little cottage we’d heard about, a cottage said to
have been given by King Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn, who would become his second wife. It was
Tudor-styled with timbered walls, a steeply pitched, red-tiled roof, and a garden full of roses — in
beds and climbing walls and fence and trellises, all in great profusion. The well was engulfed in
honeysuckle. We were taking photos from outside the fence when an upstairs window opened and
a man’s face appeared. “Feel free to come into the garden,” he said. “We’ll be down in a jot.” And
presently he and his wife were showing us around and telling us about renting the historic cottage,
living there, working on the garden, and so on. Over dinner that night, we enjoyed telling Mother
and Hilda about the couple and the cottage.
The weather was perfect, the meadows were filled with my favourite wildflowers —buttercups
and Queen Anne’s lace —and we loved the area. We had a ploughman’s lunch — bread and butter
and cheeses and pickled onions — or fish and chips at a different quaint pub every day. We noticed
beautiful houses and expensive cars everywhere. Many of the local homeowners worked in and
commuted to the City, London’s financial district, Hilda told us. “You’re in the heart of the gin-andJag belt, dear,” she confided, cocking an eyebrow.
Soon the English leg of the trip drew to an end. We said goodbye to Mother and thanked Hilda
and Les, once again, for their long friendship and the loving care they gave Mother. Then we called
on Kath, dear companion to the late Winnie, at her little senior’s home. We all had tears in our eyes
as we sat in her garden and had the customary cup of tea and slice of cake. It was an emotional
farewell — we wouldn’t see Kath again — and then we were on our way to Dover and the ferry to
Belgium.
The crossing and the Ostend–Spa run were much as they’d been when we lived there. The first
thing we did when we got to Spa was, of course, drive up route de la Géronstère to see La Courtille,
the house we’d lived in for six years, twenty years earlier. The occupants noticed us looking at it. We
told them what it meant to us, and they invited us in for, as monsieur put it, “un petit cognac.” He
was the local chef de police; he and his wife and two children loved La Courtille too. It was odd to sit
in “our” house and see it filled with someone else’s furnishings and pictures.
The second thing we did was call on Robert and Claire Noirhomme at their house down by the
church. We had dinner with them, and we all talked about the past. About the years we’d spent in
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“The Pearl of the Belgian Ardennes.” About their parents, our kids … about so many things. We told
them we were going to re-explore the valleys and highlands that we knew so well when we lived
there, retrace favourite drives, revisit favourite villages. They were both true Spadois — born in Spa,
lived there their whole lives. For them it was simply home. They were fascinated to think that the
little town and its surroundings held Alex and me so thoroughly in their spell.
The next day we walked around town and visited some of the shops and cafés we used to
patronize. In several cases we found out that the people running the store were the children of those
who’d run it in our day.
Then we did what we had talked to Robert and Claire about — we re-explored, retraced, revisited.
And loved every minute of it. And laughed at shared memories. And at one that we didn’t share:
At one point on a stretch of road I’d always liked, I asked Alex if he remembered what was around
the next bend. “You tell me,” he said. “A sawmill,” I said. We rounded the bend and there stood
the sawmill. We both laughed at this. We re-remembered heart-rending thoughts too — wartime
history, stories and anecdotes we’d heard and read about the Battle of the Bulge, which had raged
all over this region. But we didn’t let these thoughts rain all over our holiday. It was great to be
back in this part of the world that we’d known and loved. We greatly enjoyed, just as we always had,
leisurely motoring alongside the sinuous Semois, spotting the castles that overlook the valley and
the cottages that overlook the slow-moving river. The Semois hadn’t — mercifully — changed since
our last drive along its pleasant banks. “I bet those otters we heard splashing about, that night we
stayed in the hotel on the river at Poupehan, are still at it,” I said to Alex. “Their pups, anyway.”
We returned to Spa. We had one last dinner with Robert and Claire, at a rustic inn on the way
out of town. It was a poignant evening — we were all pretty sure it was the last time the Loranges and
the Noirhommes would break bread together. We were right, as it turned out.
Next morning we drove back to Ostend. Then from Dover to chez Hilda and Les, to spend time
with them and Mother. There was another round of hugs and kisses, and soon we were winging our
way west across the Atlantic, our hearts full of happy memories — old ones and new ones too. It was
exactly the way the end of a return-visit holiday should be.
In March of ’eighty-four we travelled in new directions: west to California, then much further
west — and decidedly south — to Australia.
In Los Angeles we stayed with Bob and Ruby Walker, a couple we’d known in Caracas. A New
Yorker from Brooklyn, Bob had worked at Chiclets Adams Venezuela when our upstairs neighbour,
Hartley Prince, had been general manager. Their kids had gone to the British School in Las Mercedes
with Gerry and Kirk. We all four grinned like Cheshire cats when they met us at the airport. They
took us to their home in Canoga Park, and over the next three days we talked for many hours about
our Caracas years. We laughed, recollecting patriotic little Bobby Jr.’s assessment of history classes
at the British School: “I just don’t believe that the British won all those battles. I wish there was an
American school here where I could learn the truth!” Ruby reminded me of the little Briticisms
their kids had picked up at school — “I think I’ll have a bite to eat” was one of them — and how they
amused her and Bob.
Patti had asked me to call her girlfriend Cindy while in L.A. and pass along her love. Cindy was
a West Island girl who had married a professional hockey player. Originally a defenseman for the
Montreal Canadiens, Brian had been traded to the Los Angeles Kings. So I called Cindy. She was
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so happy to hear from Patti that she invited us to her home in Tarzana. I asked if we could come
with our friends Bob and Ruby. “Sure,” she said. Ruby was delighted to be included — she knew that
the homes in that area are very up-market and she was curious to see the extravagant lifestyle of
a pro athlete. So off we went to Cindy and Brian’s. Bob and Alex were vaguely disappointed that
Brian wasn’t there, but Ruby wasn’t disappointed at all: the enormous house was on a high bluff
overlooking canyons where other huge houses nestled. Cindy showed us around, nonchalantly
pointing out feature after feature after feature. We didn’t stay long. We complimented her on her
home and thanked her for the tour. And I was able to report back to Patti that Cindy seemed to be
doing very well in the Golden State.
It was a great reunion with the Walkers, a memorable visit.
They delivered us to lax for our Qantas flight to Sydney. Soon we were aboard the 747, settling
in for the longest flight of our lives. We loved hearing the captain’s Australian accent as he described
the journey ahead. And before long we left California, left North America, and followed the setting
sun. After what seemed an eternity, we landed in Honolulu for a midnight refueling stop. We all
deplaned into the hot, humid in-transit zone. “This feels like Cuban air,” I said to Alex. Time seemed
to stand still. Finally we reboarded and the plane lifted into the night sky. The captain told us we’d
be in Sydney in eight hours. Eight hours! We were already tired and weary!
We managed to sleep. When dawn broke, there came an announcement that “brekkie,” as it was
described, was about to be served. Shortly thereafter I was excited to be looking down at Sydney’s
splendid harbor, very excited about the prospect of stepping onto another new continent.
Kirk was waiting for us, all smiles, all proud. He had big news: two days earlier, Trish had given
birth to a daughter they’d named Astrid! Now he too had two sons and a daughter.
We arrived at their house in the northern suburbs. It was wonderful to see the glowing Trish.
Danny and Rohan, golden-haired and brown as berries, were all excited to see us. We couldn’t
believe how much Danny had grown since he and his parents had stayed with us on Blue Haven.
We agreed with Gerry: little Rohan looked like the little Kirky, a delight to behold. Shirley, Trish’s
mother, was staying with them; it was great to see her again.
After lunch Trish explained about the rental house she’d arranged for us. It was at Palm Beach,
just a couple of miles up the peninsula. It belonged to the Heinz family and was rented to a doctor.
He had the owner’s permission to sublet it to us while he was in England visiting family. This
particular Heinz, Sir Bernard Heinz, had been involved with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
Kirk drove us to the house in the late afternoon. The ride up the coast was gorgeous. We turned
off the main road and motored up a long driveway that curved under a canopy of thick trees. With
the car pointing at the front door and the headlights on, he got out of the car. “Just a sec,” he said.
He took a stick, one among a few that were standing at the ready, and with it cleared any possible
spider webs out of the corners above the front door. “Okay. Just making sure there are no spiders
skulking about,” he said. I had been dreading the arachnids of Australia — some of them can kill
you — since booking the trip. And I’d been on the qui vive for them all day at Kirk and Trish’s. I
shuddered. We went in. I turned on all the lights and looked apprehensively around for any insect
fauna. Couldn’t see any. Kirk opened the fridge to find a cool drink. In there he found the good (and
well-prepared) doctor’s antitoxin solutions. “Oh, look at this,” he said. “Some of these are for spiders,
some for snakes,” he said. Good god, I thought. A minute later I picked something up off the counter
and a little lizard scampered off it. My hair stood on end. Before I could fully relax, Kirk gave us
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a bit of practical advice: “Check under the toilet seat before sitting down,” he said. “The redback
spiders — the males are tiny, the females are bigger, they’re all venomous —sometimes lurk there.”
Oh my good god, I thought. No wonder Patti said, “Australia’s not for me.” Then, after a hug and a kiss,
he left us to our own devices in this luxury home where we might or might not come across deadly
spiders. I didn’t sleep well, that first night.
The spider-stick thing, I later discovered, is a common thing. Surrounding Kirk and Trish’s
Newport Beach house was a thick hedge with a hole in it. One walked through the hole to get from
the street to the garden. They kept sticks on both sides of the hedge for clearing webs when they
walked through the hole in the dark. Not my idea of a good time!
The sun shone through our window the next morning, urging us up and out. We ventured
through the French doors onto the big square deck. Dozens of squawking rainbow lorikeets were in
the trees. We put bowls of stale bread crusts soaked in sugared milk — lorikeet treats that Kirk had
prepared the night before — on the deck, and the beautiful birds swooped down to feed. This exotic
spectacle drove away my fears of creepy, crawly wildlife — for the time being. As we watched, Kirk
and the boys arrived with fruit and cereal for our own breakfast. Trish had stayed home, resting
with the newborn. It had been a home birth, with Kirk and Shirley assisting the midwife. Brave lad,
I thought, when I learned this.
We went for a walk on Newport Beach, just under the headland where their house stood.
Danny and Rohan dashed about. Alex and I marvelled at the beauty of the surroundings. I was
taking everything in: the sounds, the colours, the perfect sky, the shimmering Pacific … In a little
tidal pool I spotted something bright blue. Some kind of sea anemone, I thought, and was about to
gently touch it when: “Don’t!” yelled Kirk. “Don’t touch that!” I just about jumped out of my skin.
“Blue-ringed octopus,” he explained. “Deadly poisonous. Don’t see them all that often here. I’ll find
something to put it in and [indicating over his shoulder] take it over there. Dad, keep the boys well
away from it.” He found a toy bucket and spade lying on the sand and carefully transferred the
creature — it turned from blue to sand-coloured the moment it was touched — from the pool into a
little bucketful of seawater, then carried it over to the lifeguard station. “Goodonya, mate,” said one
of the fit-as-a-fiddle lifeguards. “It’ll go to a marine lab where they work on antitoxins,” Kirk said.
More antitoxins, I thought. No continent has — needs — as many antitoxins as this one. “If it had stung
you,” Kirk went on, “without an antitoxin injection, you’d have had about twenty minutes to live.
Little kids die within five or ten minutes of being stung.” At that point I was just about ready to fly
home early — that afternoon, if possible.
A couple of days later, Kirk showed me a little article in the local paper. The photo showed two
lifeguards, one of whom was holding a stick from which draped the octopus. The text described
how they’d found it and disposed of it. The young man who had found it and disposed of it, sitting
across the table from me, assigned to them a local slang term of disparagement!
Kirk and Trish’s house was interesting. It was very modern, with big windows giving onto
fabulous views. Every door was a different bright colour. It was an early project by an architect who
went on to be well known. Architecture students often asked if they could come into the garden
and take a look at it. They rented it from a Tongan professor and his wife. The prof — I forget where
he taught; it wasn’t in Australia — was approaching retirement and eventually he and his wife would
move into it. In any event, it was getting small for a growing family of five.
We saw Kirk’s friend Rod McCarter a couple of times. Rod is the one who used to live in Dollard,
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who’d visited Kirk, fallen in love with Australia, and moved there. It was good to see him and hear
how much he loved the life he was now living there.
We saw lovely little Astrid a lot. We felt blessed to be there during her first couple of weeks of life.
And it was wonderful to be there with her other grandmother . Two grannies, from two continents,
very special. We visited beautiful Sydney, of course. Saw the elegant Sydney Opera House and the handsome
Sydney Harbour Bridge (“the coat hanger,” colloquially). We toured the harbour by boat and saw its
many little bays, coves and beaches, its impressive points and headlands. We were very taken with
it all. And we travelled further afield, too: saw some of the wine-producing Hunter Valley area. Trish
and I went to a Baha’i temple one day. It was dome-roofed, silent, and quite fascinating. There was a
mesmerizing quality to it that made me happy to be there.
The Heinz house faced Pittwater, an elongated bay. On the other side of Pittwater is Ku-RingGai Chase National Park, miles and miles of wild bush threaded with waterways. North of there,
Kirk took us on a passenger boat up the Hawkesbury River. A nice photo of Alex and me was
taken — in it we’re leaning against a railing, looking tanned and happy.
There were many highlights. And neither of us needed any antitoxin of any kind! We had a lot
to talk about, flying back to the Northern Hemisphere. We spent a night in a hotel adjacent to lax
and by the next night we were back on Blue Haven.
There was one more highlight to come: Three months after we’d been home, a large package
arrived from Kirk. It was an oil painting. He had made a painting of the photo of us taken that day
on the Hawkesbury. An oil painting. He had made the background more interesting than in the
photo — just like him to enhance and improve.
Gerry later arranged to have the painting matted and framed. It’s a wonderful souvenir of a
wonderful trip. It’s given me pleasure for over thirty years now.
{ may 1985 – may 1988 }
In late May of 1985 a memorable and amusing little get-together — a bump-together, you might
say — took place on the patio in the back garden on Blue Haven Drive. It was a Saturday. Gerry was
visiting with a girlfriend we hadn’t met before. We knew from him that she was a Brit, that she’d just
moved to Montreal from Toronto, that she too worked as an art director in an advertising agency,
and that they had met in a business context. We knew that they’d been to Quebec City together for
a romantic weekend. But this was the first time we’d actually met her. He had told me he was crazy
about her, and I instantly saw why: she was smart, beautiful, tall, blonde, stylish …
Her name was Caroline Jarvis, and Alex and I were enjoying getting to know her. “Actually, we
can’t stay long,” Gerry said, studiedly casually, fifteen minutes into the visit. “We’re on our way to
Kitchener. We’re going to visit Caroline’s dad.” I had a feeling his next sentence would be momentous,
and I was right: “I’m going to ask him for her hand in marriage.” And with that all four of us shot up
off our chairs and in our excitement bumped into each other before launching into a big round of
hugs and kisses. It was a moment full of joy, full of promise.
He was thirty-seven at that time; she had just turned twenty-seven. He told me that he knew,
twenty minutes after meeting her, I’m going to marry this girl. He waited seven weeks to propose,
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“Just so she wouldn’t think I’m an idiot.” She was born just thirty miles from where I was born, I
discovered. And she has hazel eyes, just as I do. Caroline and I have been great friends from the very
beginning. As I said back then, “She fits into this family like a hand into a glove.”
It happened that our Cuban friends Cirilo and Lilli Villaverde — they’ve appeared in these pages
a number of times, starting in the chapter on Mexico — were visiting us from Florida that summer.
This had been arranged a couple of months before all the Gerry-and-Caroline excitement. So of
course they were included in an engagement party that Alex and I threw in Old Montreal. Patti
brought her helicopter pilot boyfriend Scotty and Terry, her on-air companion at chom. Just three
years younger than Caroline, Patti said that Caro would be “the sister I never had.” And she said this
about Ger and his bride-to-be: “They’re joined at the lips.”
At that party Gerry stood and proudly said, “I have an announcement to make.” We knew what
was coming; we got our glasses ready. “Caroline and I will be married this December 21st at the
Church of St. James the Apostle.” We all toasted the news. Cirilo ordered a bottle of champagne,
and we all toasted the betrothed again. He and Lilli, who’d known Gerry since he was born, were
delighted to have been part of such an eventful occasion.
Other highlights of the Villaverdes’ visit were a trip to Quebec City and a detour to rustic little
Île d’Orléans. They thoroughly enjoyed their stay in, as the travel brochures boast, La Belle Province.
Meanwhile, the Loranges had a wedding to look forward to.
That summer flew by. Caroline moved into Gerry’s apartment. They went to Toronto together,
then to New York, then to Vermont, then to the Laurentians north of Montreal. Gerry started
planning their month-long Hawaiian honeymoon. Together they started planning their wedding
and the party that would follow. They had several meetings with John Wright, the young minister
of St. James the Apostle, who coincidentally had known Gerry for years — he was Ger and Kirk’s
neighbour during the short time they shared an apartment downtown. Speaking of Kirk, he wrote
Gerry saying, more or less, “Sorry, Ger, with regrets, I won’t be able to attend your wedding. I’ll be
touring Australia with a band over the Christmas period. I’ll be thinking of you on the big day and
I’ll meet the love of your life another time.”
I began planning the dress that I would make to wear to the event. I found a pattern I liked:
knee-length, long sleeves, no waistline. Then I found some lovely French lace, Wedgewood blue
with a scalloped edge. It was expensive material — I checked and double-checked every procedure,
especially the cutting. The lining was exactly the same shade of blue, attached at the neckline. A
tricky project, but I was very happy with the result. Patti was one of two bridesmaids; they would
wear dresses of deep iris blue, Caroline’s favourite colour. Caro, ever stylish, shopped for the perfect
wedding dress. Gerry, no fuss no muss, planned to wear his navy blue suit and a new silk bow tie.
Autumn raced by. Winter was upon us in a flash. Alex attended Gerry’s stag party at the Ritz
Carlton Hotel (no girls leapt out of cakes, I was told). Came the weekend of the wedding. Baden,
Caroline’s dad, Jamie, her brother, and Ann, Baden’s girlfriend (Caroline’s mother died young; Baden
and Ann later married) arrived in town from Kitchener. The rehearsal took place. I loved the old
church with its high timbered ceiling, its British and Canadian flags. Alex and I threw a rehearsal
dinner at one of Ger and Caro’s favourite restaurants. The best man, Australian Tim Harris, who’s
already appeared in these pages, was of course present.
Saturday, December 21, the day of the wedding, dawned bitterly cold. There was a chill wind and
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it was snowing. Caroline had spent the previous night with Jeanne, her friend and bridesmaid. The
two of them, plus Patti, made final preparations in the bridal suite of the Four Seasons Hotel, which
Gerry and Caroline’s offices had booked and paid for. Gerry, for the first and only time, treated
himself to a barbershop shave. He dressed alone and would later take a taxi to the church. “Nice day
for a wedding,” he would tell the driver, brushing snow off his shoulders.
In the late afternoon, the wedding took place. Alex and the Kitchener party and I were among
the very first to arrive; I recognized many of Gerry’s friends as the church quickly filled. No one
was late, despite the weather. Presently Gerry and Tim and Reverend Wright appeared at the altar.
Gerry beamed an enormous smile at us. Music began: the Prince of Denmark’s March played as
Caroline and her dad walked down the aisle. She looked radiant in a floor-length confection of
iridescent white. Baden looked proud as can be. Patti and Jeanne followed, gorgeous in deep blue.
As she walked toward him Caroline noticed that Gerry was wearing new glasses, glasses he hadn’t
mentioned to her. “Nice glasses,” I saw her whisper when she arrived at the altar.
The ceremony took place. Big smiles all around. And a few wet eyes, naturally. Christmas
carols were sung. Then a large party made its way to a photographer’s studio not far away. Peter
Baumgartner, a friend of Gerry and Caroline, had made his enormous studio, which comprised
a full kitchen, available for the party. A caterer had been hired and tables had been set up, each
of them adorned with a little bouquet of deep blue irises and gold and white freesia. A doorman
dressed as Santa pointed guests toward parking spots, welcomed them in jolly fashion, and directed
them to an anteroom set up with clothes racks. A string quartet played as people entered the studio
itself. A delicious dinner and great wines were served. The quartet played on. Toasts were made. Tim
made a speech, Gerry made a speech, John Wright made a speech. Caroline made a short speech.
Alex made a speech in which he mentioned “the English roses of the family” as he indicated me
and Caroline. Glasses were rung and the newlyweds obligingly kissed at every ring. Then there was
dancing, of course. It was a marvellous evening. The groom and bride eventually made their way to
the Four Seasons. The next night, they stayed at our place, in Alex’s and my bed, and in the morning
they flew to Hawaii.
That October, I turned sixty-five and had to retire from the Lakeshore General. The Medical Records
staff gave me a royal send-off at a West Island restaurant. I was presented with a silver brooch and a
silk scarf. Toward the end of the meal, someone behind me put their hands over my eyes and asked,
“Guess who?” I recognized my own daughter’s voice, of course! I was the only one surprised to see
Patti there — she’d been part of the plan all along.
So: sixty-five, retired, on the cusp of drawing my pensions. But: Alex had no intention of retiring
from a job he was still enjoying — not until we could sell our house and afford to buy a nice condo
out west. Victoria was still our target, but it didn’t seem the move would happen in the immediate
future.
The winter of 1985–86 was a bad one (and so was the one followed, I see from my diaries), but at
least I was no longer commuting back and forth in the cold to the hospital. The previous winter the
car hadn’t started, after some shifts, and I’d had to take a taxi home. On the mornings after those
midnight surprises, I got up early enough to leave the house with Alex; we’d drive to my car, and
he’d boost my battery. But it was worth all the bother and inconvenience: thanks to my full-time
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years in Medical Records, I receive, in addition to my federal and provincial pensions, one from the
Lakeshore General, and another that I qualify for because I was a union member during that period.
In February of 1986, Alex, in his capacity as the comptroller of m&r Plastics, was to attend a
seminar in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. His boss had said, “Take Pat. Get a break from winter, both of
you.” We flew down and were about to check into the convened hotel when we discovered that the
seminar had been cancelled. Alex phoned m&r and reported the cancellation. “Enjoy the sun for a
few days,” was the directive. We did enjoy it.
There were a number of calls from Hilda that winter. Mother was in her early nineties now, and
her health was becoming a concern. She was still up and about, still had self-confidence and energy,
but Hilda and I worried — What’s the plan for when the picture isn’t as rosy? It was a concern I’d had
for a while. I’ll visit in the fall, I told Hilda, and we’ll look for a retirement home for her, see what’s
available.
That spring I got in touch with Anne Stern, a West Island real estate agent and a very nice woman.
We talked about 374 Blue Haven, about putting it on the market within the next few years. It needed
some attention. We got busy addressing the issues: I painted all the rooms. I decorated with pretty
borders. Alex installed maintenance-free material under the eaves all around the house. With a
friend he built a brick barbecue on the flagstone terrace. And there were other enhancements. The
house looked very attractive when we’d finished, easily more saleable than others of its size and age
in that neighbourhood. Anne gave us an idea of its value. And — good news — the price of condos
in British Columbia wasn’t racing upward at quite the same rate we’d seen earlier. The prognosis for
the Loranges’ retirement was looking brighter.
In September, I flew to England to see Mother and Hilda. The three of us shopped around for
retirement homes. We saw none that would be pleasant for Mother to spend her final years in. We
had many of her friends over for tea. The three of us enjoyed outings to various attractions in Surrey,
Sussex, and Kent. We put the matter of a retirement home on hold, and I flew back to Canada.
The year ended on a blue note when we learned that woe had befallen the Australian contingent
of the family. Kirk was at that time playing in several lineups in and around Sydney, and there were
road trips, too. The pressures and strains of balancing a rock musician’s life and a family man’s life
had eventually proved unsustainable — he and Trish had separated. She and the kids had moved to
Byron Bay, some nine hundred kilometres up the coast, and Kirk, to his chagrin, became a visiting
father. He was devastated that the kids were that far away. Every visit was an eighteen-hour road
trip. “I go as often as I can,” he wrote, “but it’s never enough. I’m missing out on countless milestones
in their lives.” (In fact, Australian law now prevents one parent from moving the kids more than two
hundred kilometres away from the other parent.) He would later leave Sydney and move north, to
be closer to his children, as we’ll see in the next chapter.
Spring 1987. If all goes to plan, if we’re soon to be British Columbians, Alex and I rationalized, we
should take a drive-to-Florida holiday now, while we’re still Easterners. And we did just that. We
drove to Sanibel, an island off the Gulf Coast. Sanibel is very special — not commercialized (not
tackily so, at least), and given over in large part to a wildlife refuge, it’s famous for excellent shelling
(shell collectors adopt the famous “Sanibel stoop”). And Captiva Key, adjacent, linked by a short
bridge, is as charming as its name implies. We stayed in a comfortable rented condo and we quietly
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explored. Alex played tennis, and we walked the great beaches together. I did some shelling, too.
We liked Sanibel so much that we drove there again in 1988 and stayed in the same condo.
This will be the very last Florida holiday, we figured. That time, Gerry and Caroline flew down and
stayed with us for a week. We celebrated Caro’s thirtieth birthday in the Bubble Room, an eccentric
Captiva Key café that we knew she’d like. We introduced them to a young couple we’d befriended
the year before. They lived on Sanibel year-round, these two. They took the four of us out on their
boat, and we admired the island from the water. It was fun to glean local knowledge. Stories of drug
busts — Sanibel is the type of sleepy backwater that smugglers favour — were quite fascinating.
Back to 1987, back to the West Island: One afternoon, Alex’s cousin Thelma called. She and I had
a conversation that changed … everything. She was just back from Vancouver. She and the party
she’d been visiting had driven south of the city to a town on the coast that I’d noticed on the map,
but knew nothing about: White Rock. She told me about how pretty it was, that it was popular with
retirees, and that it was known to have a sunnier, drier climate that Vancouver. She pointed out
something that I hadn’t thought of: one of the drawbacks of living in Victoria is the ferry to the
mainland; the lineups to board are often hours long, and the fare is always rising. And she signed
off with this: “Apparently there are a lot of airline pilots living in White Rock. Apparently they can
see, as they take off and land at Vancouver International, that the weather over White Rock is very
often better than in surrounding areas.”
I thought all of this over and wrote to the White Rock Chamber of Commerce, requesting a
brochure. It arrived a few days later. I read every word of it and instantly fell in love with White
Rock. By the time Alex got home I just about knew the brochure’s text by heart. I was all agog with
plans. “We’re not going to retire to Victoria after all,” I said, all excited, as he walked in.
He look stunned as he grinned and asked, “Where the heck are we retiring to, then?” He sat
down and I handed him the brochure. He saw right away why I was excited. “Looks like a little town
in England, or New England,” he said. “A bit like Spa, even,” he added. He read the brochure and
we talked about White Rock as we ate dinner. By the time we’d finished eating, we’d scratched the
Victoria plan altogether. It was definite: we were retiring to White Rock.
I started spreading the news. I told Edie Weaver first, then another Fairview Village friend. This
woman’s husband had a cousin who was a Lower Mainland real estate agent (the Lower Mainland
is that populous part of B.C. that surrounds and includes Vancouver). This fellow immediately
got on the phone with his cousin, Walter Doré, who told me he’d begin mailing me the fortnightly
Advisor. The properties-for-sale bulletin began arriving and I began going over it, twice a month,
with a fine-toothed comb, map of White Rock at hand. In the very first copy received was a listing
that caught my eye: South-facing; expansive ocean view; on Foster St., close to shopping; etc. The price
seemed high, to my inexpert eye, but I thought, This is the kind of unit we’ll be looking for, when we
get there.
I sent Mother the White Rock brochure. Doesn’t this remind you of English seaside resorts? I
wrote. This is the little town that Alex and I have decided to retire to. And I listed and extolled White
Rock’s features, attractions, and benefits. She wrote back heartily approving of our decision.
Three trips to England:
In September Hilda called. Mother was in the hospital again, she said. I got over there as soon
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as I could. Hilda’s husband, Les, had died since my last visit, and she didn’t like to drive in heavy
traffic, so I took a taxi from Heathrow to the hospital. Mother was stronger than I was expecting,
which was good to see. I stayed with Hilda for three weeks, visiting Mother regularly, watching her
get stronger and stronger.
Alex had had a gall bladder operation earlier that year, and had (new for him) high blood
pressure. When I could see that Mother was definitely on the mend, I left her to be with him.
Within a month came another call from Hilda. Mother had to undergo surgery again. Again I
flew to England. This is going to be much more difficult when we’re living on the West Coast, I thought.
Mother was hospitalized for a week, that time. Hilda and I again scouted around for retirement
homes, but again found nothing that we thought was suitable. Again we carried out and oversaw
minor repairs and renovations to Mother’s flat. A social worker visited us there; with her we
discussed Mother’s situation. We talked about her investments at the building society (most Brits
use these institutions for their financial affairs); about her help (Hilda, Hilda’s friend Stan, regular
visits from government-paid caregivers); and so on. Meanwhile, Mother was rallying.
One evening, Hilda and I were watching the first half of the Australian tearjerker The Shiralee on
TV. The soundtrack consisted largely of guitar solos. “That sure sounds like Kirk’s style and touch,”
said Hilda, who’d heard Druick & Lorange and a number of tapes of Kirk on his own (and who’d
obviously listened carefully). I agreed with her, but I thought Kirk would have told me if a film that
he’d worked on was in international release. The next night, we watched the second half — and the
credits. And there it was, white on black, rolling upward — guitar: kirk lorange! We were both
thrilled. I figured out that it was daytime in Australia; I called Kirk. “Hilda and I just watched The
Shiralee,” I said, all excited. “We heard you — Hilda even recognized your playing! — and saw your
name in the credits!” He was all blasé about the soundtrack, but asked what I was doing in England.
I told him about his Granny’s operation. “Give her my love,” he said. Next day we told her about
the call, The Shiralee, Kirk’s fond wishes. She was so proud to report all this to the caregivers on her
ward.
She was discharged; I took her home. She looked and seemed hale and spry. She wanted to
say something about future visits. It was along these lines: “Don’t come again, Pet. Soon you’ll be
in British Columbia, that much further away. And you and Alex will both be retired and you’ll be
watching your budget carefully. These transatlantic visits, much as I’ve loved every one of them,
can’t go on. And I can’t fly to Canada again.” We were saying goodbye. We both did our best to be
pragmatic and sensible, but it wasn’t an easy exchange. We’ll write, we’ll keep in close touch, we’ll be
close in our hearts, we said. It wasn’t an easy farewell, either. British stiff upper lips notwithstanding.
I left her in Hilda’s care and got back to Alex.
Shortly after that Mother had another visitor from Montreal: Caroline was in London working
on a TV commercial. She called on Mother. They had tea together. Mother was delighted to meet
her first grandson’s wife. And a Brit at that! Caroline loved meeting her, too. She later told me how
touched she’d been, to see a photo of herself and Gerry — to see photos of all of us — in that little flat
in Wallington. Mother would live five years more, but it was Caro who saw her last.
Soon there was another call from Hilda. Good news this time. She’d managed to get Mother
safely moved into a very nice, very comfortable retirement home. It was in a suburb near Hilda’s
house and it had a lovely garden, she reported. Mother loved it, she added. Soon I had photos of it,
and photos of dear Mother pouring tea for other residents. “I help with the old people,” she said in
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a letter to Gerry and Caroline after she’d moved. This from a 94-year-old! She became very popular,
since with her good singing voice she had joined the musical group, which sang a few times a week.
We’d always exchanged lots of letters. Now I wrote even more often, including photos whenever I
had new ones and postcards anytime we travelled. At birthdays and Christmas I’d send a handmade
scarf or a little needlepointed picture. In her responses she sounded very happy to be where she was.
“The food is excellent,” she wrote, more than once.
Dear Hilda. I could always count on her to find the perfect solution.
In the fall of ’eighty-seven, Patti had itchy feet and decided it was time for a change of scenery.
She left chom and went to Winnipeg to work for a friend who ran a rock station there and had
an opening for a deejay on the overnight slot. That gig didn’t last long. She didn’t enjoy being solo
on air and making small talk between tunes. Her forte was riposte and repartee. Luckily, a spot
opened up on the show known as “The Morning Zoo,” opposite a fellow who went by the “nom de
microphone” Brother Jake and who happened to be Winnipeg’s top rock jock in those days. So she
moved back to her familiar time zone and had a fun time on air with Jake and his crew.
1987–88 — our last winter in Montreal. The highlight of the season was the night Gerry and Caroline
invited us for supper. “We have a surprise for you,” he’d said. He and Caro had bought a condo in Old
Montreal, so we made our way down to the old city and were totally delighted with their surprise:
Patti was there! She was in town for a few days. She told us about her life in “the Peg.” Winter in that
city, she said, made Montreal’s winter look like the rehearsal for the real thing.
On Valentine’s Day, we put the house on the market. Conventional wisdom holds that spring
and fall are the best times to put a house on the market, but by February we were raring to go — to go
west, to move into retirement, to begin the next chapter. Alex had begun to plan his exit from m&r;
m&r had begun to plan the post-Alex finance and accounting department. I had begun to plan what
we’d pack and what we’d give away.
The Advisor continued to arrive. I kept noticing that the Foster Street condo with the view to the
south was still for sale.
Another couple was intrigued by White Rock: Derek and Monique Lepper, the couple we’d
met at Gerry’s bedside at the Neuro. They’d moved from downtown to the West Island, and they’d
become our friends as well as Gerry and Caro’s. And they, too, were thinking of moving from
Quebec to British Columbia. I shared my copies of The Advisor with them. We’ll get back to this in
the next chapter!
Meanwhile Anne Stern was staging Sunday afternoon open houses and showing the house to a
string of potential buyers. There was a man from Beirut, I remember. A couple from Vermont. A Mr.
Corretti who made an appointment but never showed up. In fact, some Sundays no one showed at
all. But Anne wasn’t discouraged and nor were we.
Something happened that was dispiriting, though. In March, Alex had the misfortune to lose
the sight in one eye while playing tennis. A slip on a newly resurfaced court put him where he
hadn’t intended to be — and put his right eye right in the path of the oncoming ball. It dislodged the
cornea and forced it into the vitreous humor, the chamber behind the lens, preventing vision in that
eye. Boom! Just like that. Poor Alex. The doctor at the Jewish General preferred to not operate. He
preferred to let the cornea atrophy and postpone its removal from the vitreous humor. Alex soon
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adapted to one-eyed vision and continued to drive, work, read … even play tennis! Amazing what
we can get used to.
In early April, Anne showed the house to a Chinese couple whose name was Kwo. They were
from Mauritius, the island nation in the Indian Ocean; they’d been living in England. They liked the
house a lot, Anne told us.
There were a number of farewell parties. m&r Plastics threw one at a landmark restaurant on Île
Sainte-Hélène, an island in the St. Lawrence opposite Montreal. Alex’s tennis pals threw one. Edie
and Jack came into town from Carlton Place and took us out for dinner at a favourite steakhouse.
Gerry and Caroline took us to dinner at a French restaurant. There was a lovely Mother’s Day
brunch, gals only, with many old friends from within and without Fairview Village. Neighbours
stopped in for au revoir drinks. My ex-colleagues in Medical Records asked me up to the hospital
to wish me well. Everyone was toasting our British Columbian future. It was all very momentous.
The Kwos came for a second visit. They seemed very keen, Anne reported.
Gerry and Caroline threw us a second farewell dinner, this time at a Belgian restaurant, with
Michael Fog, Tim Harris, and Derek and Monique. Tim was recently back from Australia. On that
trip he’d met a certain Clancy Mullins, Kirk’s new girlfriend. Kirk had mentioned Clancy more
than once in letters. He’d met her while playing a live gig. From the stage he’d spotted her dancing;
after the set he’d found himself in her proximity and had struck up a conversation. A true rockand-roll love story, seems to me. “What’s she like?” we asked. “She’s a right bobby dazzler,” said Tim,
Australian accent broad, eyebrows accentuating his meaning. We all looked forward to meeting her!
The Kwos confirmed their intentions. In mid-April they bought the house. They loved the decor.
The flowered borders on painted walls, the copper jugs and mugs, small wall-mounted lamps with
cute little shades, and so on. The living-room fireplace, with tidy storage left and right. The ceiling
beam in the dining room, panelled to look like solid wood. They said it all reminded them of
England, and asked if they could photograph the rooms to inspire their own decorating. All my
hours of embellishing and titivating have paid off, I thought. They requested a building inspection;
the house passed the test. Alex worked his last week at m&r. I called Walter Doré, our agent in
White Rock, told him we’d be heading west within a few days, and that we were looking forward to
meeting him. “Oh, and keep an eye on that south-facing condo on Foster,” I said. It was still on the
market.
With the house now sold, we could begin to pack. And pack we did, all the livelong day, for
several days. The Salvation Army came and took away a number of items I knew we wouldn’t need
in B.C. I’d made arrangements to sell my little Civic to Alan and Peggy Weaver; they now took
possession. At 8:30 a.m. on May 16, the movers arrived. They packed the truck while Alex and I
packed his Accord, readied it for the drive across the continent, which we were looking forward to.
By 4:30 p.m. the task was done. The movers drove off. I put all the plants in an inch of water in the
bathtub in case the new owners wanted to keep them. Anne Stern came by, and we gave her all our
house keys. I gave her a big hug, thanked her for her services, and, twenty-three years after making
it our home, we drove away from 374 Blue Haven Drive for the last time.
One last memory of 374 before we leave this chapter:
For one of his birthdays in the late 1980s, I forget which, Patti gave Alex a most original present.
It was an audio tape. With a friend, a sports announcer with a perfect radio voice, she’d cooked
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up an imaginary tennis match, a contest between Alex and one of the top-seeded players of the
day — complete with the pock-pock of the ball and the roar of the thousands in attendance. “Listen
to this, Dad,” she said as she pressed Play. We were all there — Alex, Patti, Gerry, Caro, and I. The
announcer set the scene: “Here we are at Wimbledon’s Centre Court, ladies and gentlemen …” Then
he introduced the players: “Competing this afternoon are the Grand Slam Champ André Agassi
and the gifted Canadian amateur Alex Lorange, whose first appearance this is on the main court of
the All England Lawn Tennis Club.” At this Alex’s face lit up, and he leaned forward to hear every
word, every nuance. The announcer mentioned Alex’s entourage — wife Patricia, daughter Patti,
and so on. Then he embarked on the play-by-play, which was very detailed and colourful. I can’t
remember the scoreline, but Alex won the first set, barely, and Agassi won the second, convincingly.
Alex was enjoying the gift immensely, grinning like a kid in a toy store, loving every moment. The
all-important third set was hard-fought and furious, and Alex listened very attentively. After a long
rally the announcer had Alex nail a sizzling crosscourt ball that Agassi wasn’t able to return. The
crowd roared its approval. “I won!” exclaimed Alex, even before the announcer could make that
point. A marvellous moment. “Great playing, Dad,” said Patti, but she was the real hero of the day.
He played that tape for friends and visitors for years to come.