by John Calder
I was born in that city on 25th January 1927. My mother had preferred to return to the bosom of her family, and especially her mother and Canadian doctors, to have me. The same happened with the birth of her two other children, my sister Betty (Elizabeth Thérèse) three and a half years later, and my brother James Wilson, five years after me. We were all born in Montreal and in the care of a Dr Goldbloom, a paediatrician at the hospital on the mountain that overlooks the city. I was born at home in a house on Pine Avenue just under the heavily forested Mount Royal itself. It must have been some time after that that my Wilson grandfather, who had a palatial house with a large garden on Ontario Avenue (now called the Rue du Musée) bought my mother’s house, referred to above, as a gift, which was only a few doors higher up the hill than his own, and planted directly opposite the house of one of his elder daughters. I was to spend much time there as I grew up, and later during the war. I still remember the address: 3525 Ontario Avenue. Today it is the Polish Embassy.
My birthday is also Robert Burns’s birthday, and this was greeted as a happy omen in Scotland. Robert Burns, the national poet, has his birthday celebrated, usually in a highly ritualized manner, on or around that day, not just in Scotland, but among the Scottish diaspora all over the world. I later discovered that it was also the birthday of W. Somerset Maugham, whose novels I was so much to admire when a teenager, and of Virginia Woolf, who became a favourite author in adulthood. My Scottish grandfather, delighted to know that his family name and bloodstock would continue, immediately made arrangements to entail his house and estate on me after his death, and he put my name down for Britain’s best-known public school for Catholics, Ampleforth in Yorkshire, which is run by Benedictine monks, as was my father’s school at Fort Augustus. Such is the pressure to enter Britain’s top schools, it is customary to put boys’ names down at birth for the year at which they are expected to start. In my case it was at age eight at Gilling Castle, the preparatory school for Ampleforth.
There is little I remember about those first eight years. I was often in Scotland, at least once a year in Montreal, and spent some summers at American and Canadian resorts (I remember Spring Lake in New Jersey and the New Brunswick coast), and on at least two occasions I stayed at Palm Beach in Florida, where my Canadian grandfather wintered, always dapper in white trousers, lightweight dark jacket, white shoes, panama hat and cane. On one occasion when my father was at Palm Beach, he took me to a film with Gary Cooper about the Bengal Lancers. I didn’t get to see the end, because he made a great fuss to the manager about a scene where a British soldier picks up and swivels a bren gun against his attackers, claiming this was physically not possible. We were ejected into the street. There is an earlier picture of me in a sailor suit, aged about four, and another, probably at six, posing with my younger siblings. For some reason I remember my fifth birthday, when I was taken for an afternoon walk on the mountain above Ontario Avenue, reached in those days by a long stretch of steep steps, which turned the street into a cul-de-sac. It was a very cold winter day, and I remember returning in the dark to a birthday cake. I do not remember anybody being present other than the governess in charge of me, or it might have been a domestic; there were at least four in the house. My younger brother was less than a month old that day.
My father, who at that point was an ex-soldier with no fixed employment, would spend time in his clubs, the Caledonian in London or the United Services in Montreal, undoubtedly drinking too much while swapping reminiscences of the war with other ex-soldiers. He finally took a large house called Skendelby Hall in Lincolnshire, a country mansion with a large park in front of it, through which the local Fox Hunt frequently rode, and with both decorative and vegetable gardens. It was fairly isolated, with Spilsby, a small village, a mile or two away, and I spent some time there both before and after going to boarding school. My father now had a job of sorts, working at a timber yard at Boston on the Wash, part of Calders Ltd, which belonged to his uncle, Sir James. This was a drive of at least an hour. Who kept up the Montreal house and Skendelby Hall, paid for the travel, the cost of London hotels and skiing holidays in the Tyrol and other expensive pursuits, like Italian holidays? Almost entirely my mother. In fact, I should remove the “almost”. She had a large income from her father and she spent all of it. As a Canadian now resident outside of Canada, she paid very little tax and often none.
Until I went to boarding school I was almost always on my own, but this did not disturb me much, because a Belgian governess, Miss Verhaegen (I think her first name was Sylvia, but I always called her Miss Verhaegen or Mademoiselle), taught me to read early on, so that at five I could read almost anything and use a dictionary. In Montreal I occasionally saw cousins, but they were usually much older. I went to a day school called Selwyn House in Montreal for a term or two, but all I can remember is the way to get there and nothing else. There was a gardener’s son of my own age called Reggie Davey at Skendelby with whom I played games, but I recall little, and mostly remember just walking around the park on my own, sometimes having my sister follow me around the garden, and reading. I also played chess with my father, but he became very angry the first time I won, at ten years old, and much less warm and friendly thereafter, while nicer to my sister, whose company he evidently preferred. She adored him for the rest of his life, and his portrait has become her favourite icon.
The biggest problem was to get enough to read. My father read a few authors, mostly Scottish ones like Ian Hay, in vogue at the time, and books about the Great War, the most important event of his life. Skendelby had no library, unlike Ardargie, and the village shop had only a few paperbacks of adolescent fiction, the Bulldog Drummond stories being the most popular. There was the Boy’s Own Paper and similar publications, and I devoured them, but too quickly. On visits to London I would get the historical novels of G.A. Henty and must have read nearly all of them, patriotic histories about the British Empire, written as adventure books for the most part. There were also many novels about boarding schools, such as Tom Brown’s Schooldays and the series of schoolboy adventures in pulp format that featured Wharton of the Remove (if I have the name right) and a fat boy, Billy Bunter, always the butt. I discovered P.G. Wodehouse and went on reading him through my teens. And there were Swallows and Amazons and the Hornblower novels. But I read quickly and often reread, because there was never enough, and at Skendelby very little else to do. If a public library existed anywhere within miles, I was unaware of it, and my mother would never have heard of such an institution. Also, in those days, the class I belonged to never liked touching anything that had been through other hands. A library book would have been considered unclean.
In Britain I rarely saw my mother. She was in London, no doubt frequenting thés dansants and nightclubs. I doubt if she ever went to theatres – certainly not to concerts, although later she affected to like music. My father took me to one or two variety shows, and a great-aunt, Tina, my grandfather’s elder sister, who was also an aunt through marriage of Cecil Beaton the photographer, would take me to pantomimes at Christmas. I remember Babes in the Wood and Aladdin. She also took me around London on the top deck of the bus; my mother had never taken a bus in her life! And she took me to Woolworth’s, where I was allowed to spend sixpence. Sixpence could buy quite a lot in those days: in the toy department most things were a penny or less. For twopence I was able to buy a toy sword and for another twopence a scabbard and belt to go with it.
I am not sure when Miss Verhaegen stopped tutoring me. There was a man who came to Skendelby to give me lessons, probably in arithmetic, but I have no exact recollection of him. At Ardargie I had learnt to shoot, and been sent out with the gamekeeper, armed with a four-ten single-barrelled shotgun, to kill rabbits. I did not like to see them die, much less wounded and running about squealing, but I was told to do it and did. I also learnt to fish for trout in the small loch at Ardargie. I was out with my four-ten gun for a few days at Skendelby with the gardener, who was
also the keeper (there was not much game to keep), but there was no compulsion as at Ardargie, where every moment of my day was planned out by my grandfather, so I shot there rarely. I was also given a dog at Skendelby – a black Labrador puppy called Jeff, of which I instantly became fond – but as it was kept in the kennels, and almost immediately afterwards I was sent to boarding school, I saw little of the dog and I have no idea of what happened to it after we moved out in 1939.
At Skendelby Hall there was a permanent staff of a butler, a French chef called Figue, a governess for my sister and younger brother (the latter being kept in isolation so that I hardly ever saw him), other kitchen staff and probably two housemaids. My mother had her lady’s maid, who travelled to London with her. She was in any case very rarely in the country, being unaccustomed to and bored of it. Meal times were variable. I usually ate on my own, sometimes had tea with my father on weekends, but there were no family meals that I remember at Skendelby Hall. My younger sister and brother were fed separately and at different times. Ardargie was different. There I ate at least breakfast, lunch and tea with my grandparents, Gaffer and Gran, perhaps at times dinner too. I was expected to speak when spoken to and to absorb the stream of anecdotes and commonplace wisdom and instruction issuing from my grandfather. My father’s shortcomings (as a bad businessman and an undisciplined son) were often compared to his more promising younger brother, Ian, who died of leukaemia at about the time I went to school. I do not remember him at all and only have a vague recollection of his photo. I occasionally met some of my cousins who lived locally in the Tay valley and around Perthshire, in particular Bunty Manners, a girl of roughly my own age. The Calders were doubly related to the Manners. Maisie, my eldest aunt, had married a Colonel Manners, while my great-uncle, Sir James, was married to another, Mildred Manners, who died just before the war of diabetes. The latter was the only member of the family who had liked music and could play the piano; she was a friend of Dame Clara Butt, the well-known Lieder and concert singer. Music among the Calders was something you heard in church on Sundays. My grandfather and his brother each said that the other could not tell the difference between God Save the King and Rule Britannia. Various aunts occasionally turned up at Ardargie, often with their own children, and were civil to me, sometimes taking me out to tea. My father did not get on with his own father and stayed away, although he sometimes went to his uncle at Ledlanet to shoot grouse.
On my Canadian visits I met my cousins and their families on their side of the water, but was never particularly intimate with any of them, as there was usually too big an age difference, two to ten years older or more. They were all French-speaking, but they would speak English to me, although I had some French: I had been brought up on the English side of the great Montreal divide, which was not unlike the sectarianism of Protestant and Catholic Ireland. My Canadian grandfather was important enough to be above all that, but the Catholic French-Canadians were nearly always treated as inferior citizens by the English (largely Scottish) minority, overwhelmingly Protestant, who lived in the more affluent districts and usually spoke no French. The Ostiguys, Brodeurs and Raymonds all lived near the Wilson patriarchy in large houses which had been bought for them by Senator Wilson. Three of the daughters had married British husbands, all Catholics; the English one, Henry Winkworth, lived in London. Of the six daughters, five had families, varying from one to seven children. This was to become a bone of some contention when it was realized that the will and estate of my Canadian grandfather was partially divided by family and partly by individual grandchild, the mother in each case having the income for life, with the capital to be divided among the grandchildren when the mothers died. There were nineteen grandchildren after eliminating those who died before adulthood, and coming from a family of three I was placed to receive the average, a third of a sixth one way and a nineteenth the other.
The things that were to play a large part in my adult life – literature, music, the theatre and intellectual interests in general – were sadly missing in my home life as a child. My biggest problem was getting books, especially challenging ones. I had a mind that welcomed challenge, or I would not have persevered with the Smolletts, Thackerays, Macaulays and even heavier, mainly Scottish, writers in the Ardargie library as I did. Music consisted, other than hymns and whatever I heard on the odd visit to the music hall or panto, of my father’s collection of Harry Lauder records, but that was only after 1940 and in Canada. As for theatre, that started in boarding school with Latin and Greek plays in the classroom.
The sequence of events during and after the first eight years of my life is unclear, a jumble of unconnected memories. My world changed when, frightened and trying not to show it, I took a taxi with my mother from York to Gilling Castle to start school.
Chapter 2
Education
I only remember seeing the headmaster of my prep school on two occasions, once on my arrival when he welcomed me and reassured my mother before she left me trembling in his hands, and on a later occasion when my grandfather paid a visit to see how I was getting on, which must have been after a term or two. On that occasion Gaffer was told that my nickname was “the gangster”, obviously because of my North American connection. All that was newsworthy out of America at that time were the activities of Al Capone and the gangsters who had taken advantage of prohibition to become powerful and dangerous. Both sides of my family had derived enormous advantages from the Volstead Act – stipulating the banning of alcohol, with devastating consequences for the social fabric of American society: they had a seller’s market, were perfectly inside the law themselves, and the riches they derived from prohibition helped them to become even bigger pillars of society and upholders of the status quo and the moral order it implied. I of course knew nothing of this, and I do not remember the nickname except for that one occasion.
Nearly all the masters were monks. I only remember one lay teacher, a member of Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, who taught arithmetic and was constantly saying in class that Britain’s natural enemy was France and natural friend Germany. I believe he was interned at the outbreak of war.
Gilling was an old Norman Castle, built of thick, heavy stone and very cold in winter. We ate at long refectory tables. There was hot tea at every meal, but because of my initial shyness I never asked for milk, which was always at the far end of the table. I did not like black tea much, but went on as I had started, drinking black tea most of the time, and I think, unsweetened. I became a wolf cub – a junior boy scout – and we all wore a uniform in which we engaged in various hunts and chases in the woods. I enjoyed these pursuits very much, as they fed my imagination. There was cricket in summer and rugger in winter, and some track sports. On one occasion I put my hand through the window of the cricket pavilion – I can’t remember how or why, but there was some mischief involved – and gave myself a nasty cut above the left thumb, which needed five stitches. I was always aware of both indoor and outdoor cold, but became used to it.
At least once a term there was a retreat, when we became Trappists for the day. We ate in silence while Bible stories were read out to us by one of the monks. There were three church services that day and no classes, although we sat in the classroom reading prescribed religious texts, lives of the saints and that sort of thing. In class I was always best at English and History, enjoyed writing essays and was frequently complimented on them by Father Henry, the English master. I am not sure who taught me History, or even what History we studied: it was either Father Henry or Father Anthony, and I presume we were learning the History of England, but religion played its part, and I remember that martyrs were quite prominent. Latin took priority over every other subject, and I think we had a daily class. I was soon reading Virgil, whom I enjoyed more than other Latin poets. I still remember many phrases, but I was certainly not one of the brighter boys at Latin. The endless hours of mastering declensions and learning the grammar were tedious compared to reading texts a
nd translating. I had a good memory that enabled me to learn whole passages of both a Latin text and its translation, those most likely to be used in examinations and tests. I found this easier than the labour of construing in the normal way. I was not good at arithmetic, geometry or algebra, but managed to pass. I remember a few rudimentary classes in the lab, but it was clear that science was not my forte, and making stink bombs was the summit of my achievement in chemistry. We were encouraged to cultivate a small patch of garden, but all I remember growing was watercress, which incidentally I liked to eat. Classes went on all day, and there was prep in the evening after supper, an hour in a silent classroom under a master’s supervision.
The humorist among the masters was Father Anthony who, when putting out the lights in the dormitory, would regale us with funny stories and send us into fits of laughter with a simulated slip on a banana skin. We all had the same pocket money, sent by our parents, but doled out by the school, eightpence a week, half on Wednesday and half on Saturday, which could be spent in the tuck shop, open for an hour on those days. This was enough to buy two chocolate or toffee bars and some boiled sweets on each occasion. I would ensconce myself in the window seat of a long room, which served both for recreation and a place to keep clothes and personal things, on half holidays and Saturday afternoons with my legs up, and get through a McCowan’s toffee bar, a Milky Way (one penny) and then suck sweets, all the time reading a book from the library. For the first time in my life I had enough to read. My mother on one occasion sent me a book, one I had read two years earlier, and it was far too juvenile for me. There is a letter I wrote in reply,2 in better handwriting than I have now, that opens the first of the files of my publishing archives, now in the possession of the Lilly Library at the University of Indiana in Bloomington. The letter, written when I was nine, thanked my mother for the book and points out that ten shillings would be much more useful next time. As we were not allowed to have money other than the weekly pocket money, I am not quite sure how this could have been accomplished, but I do remember being tipped five shillings by my grandfather on his visit.