Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  Except for one year, I think in the sixth form, when I had a mathematics master who was able to make algebra and calculus interesting, I was always at the bottom of the class where numbers where concerned – but that year I was top or very nearly. I always did well in English and History, but had become very bored with Latin and was pretty bad at French grammar, although I had no trouble reading the language and was soon to speak it fluently. I was good at Spanish and matriculated in it. A Mr Evans taught me English. In my final year for university entrance we were studying the Romantic poets with him – Byron, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth and Tennyson – but that did not stop me from reading all the others, including the poetry of my birthday mate, Robert Burns, much of which I knew by heart.

  I had had a poem published in the Montreal Gazette, probably at about seven or eight, and I continued to write poetry myself, now lost for the most part, usually in the strict verse forms I knew from my models. I won the school poetry prize in 1945, a prize named after Kenneth Hugessen, a schoolboy poet at Bishop’s who had only recently been killed in the war. He had been two years ahead of me, and I was the first winner of the prize, which had been established in his memory by his parents. I also, during my last two years, edited the school magazine under the guidance of the Spanish master, who rather turned me into his favourite pupil. I was often in his study and noticed that he took a quick nip of whisky between classes. It was obvious from his breath, but few of the boys or the other masters seemed to notice. I think his name was De Castellis, but his nickname was Fifi; he wore a reddish wig, was smartly dressed in an old-fashioned style as if for the boardwalk at Monte Carlo, with a dapper white waistcoat, and much fun was made of him behind his back. But he was a good teacher.

  One of the older boys who had an influence on me was George Hurst, another refugee from Britain, later to become the conductor of the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. He had been something of a child prodigy, had worked with the Edwin Fischer Orchestra in London and had even, while still a small boy, conducted it at rehearsals. He obviously came from a musical family, was a good pianist, and had a collection of twelve-inch records which he would play on the gramophone in the school library. I would go there to listen to them.

  I have mentioned that as a child I never had any contact with real music. I think it was in the short period between my arrival in Canada and going to Bishop’s that on a certain Sunday afternoon I was taken to a concert by a friend of my mother’s, a Madame Éledi Taschereau, whom for some reason we called Aunt Plum-Plum. My mother obviously wanted me out of the way that day. This became my personal “Damascus Road” revelation. I only remember finding myself in a daze of glorious sound and coming out with instruments and voices ringing in my ears. The work was Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, and my love of music was born. From then on, money that did not go on books went on records. From George Hurst I learnt much about music and composers and received tips about what I should listen to, and I read all the books in the library – there were not many – that dealt with music. There was a sprinkling of other British boys, but we were at different ages and in different forms and we did not stick together much except when there were special interests in common. Robin Brackenbury, who was in my class, later became mayor of Nottingham. I came to know Leopold de Rothschild much better later in England, because we were both interested in music. Peter Winkworth, my first cousin, eventually followed me at Bishop’s, but in a lower class, as did my brother the year after I left the school. George Hurst was my mentor in music, but he was a class or two ahead of me and left when I was in the fourth form. Such was his prowess at sport that he became known as “the tank”, due to his unstoppability in Canadian football, a cross between English rugby and American football; he also held the school’s record for the hundred-yard dash.

  I had of course by now learnt to tell the time. I had also learnt about sex, the subject of much discussion, most of it misinformed, among the boys, who in the main were regular masturbators. Until about the age of fourteen I had thought that babies came from under women’s breasts and that that was where penetration took place. Little by little I became better informed.

  Holidays were in Montreal in the house on Ontario Avenue. My father, who had come out to Canada in 1943, was already a very ill man (sitting up all night guarding bridges cannot have helped his condition). His lungs, already weakened by gassing in the First World War, became worse, and aggravated by too much drinking developed into the tuberculosis that eventually killed him in 1944. His closest friend in Montreal was a Canadian ex-officer of Scottish origin, Gordon Sherris, who lived in the house next door, and they both whiled away the time at the United Services Club on Sherbrooke Street, a place to which I was occasionally taken, as I had on occasion been taken to the Caledonian Club in St James’s Square in London in the past. I impressed the club members and won a bet for my father by being able to consume several dozen oysters at a sitting. As a friend of my father I would sometimes ask Gordon Sherris’s advice on matters I could not discuss with my mother after 1944, matters that needed male experience.

  In school sports I was best at anything that involved endurance, such as the marathon or other long-distance races, and in winter at cross-country skiing. I got by at football, being shorter in height than most boys of my age – a trait from my mother, who was tiny – and played cricket indifferently: BCS was one of the very few Canadian schools where cricket was available. I certainly felt no loyalty to the school and played sports in the same spirit as I went to classes. The advantage of running and skiing was that I was on my own, not part of a team. There was no female companionship at Bishop’s. A nearby school called Compton came over to us or we went there once or twice a year for a dance, but I have absolutely no memory of such occasions. One or two of the more adventurous boys managed on occasion to date girls from the village and would meet them secretly at night or on weekends, which was of course strictly forbidden. I managed this myself, on two occasions, but nothing went beyond cuddling and kissing. I did once come across one boy, whom I particularly disliked as a big bully, actually copulating with a girl in the woods. I cannot be sure at this distance in time whether he was raping her or whether she was willing, but rape was what my companions and I assumed, and we shouted at them until they fled.

  The woods behind the school were extensive, and we used them in various ways. One year three of us pooled our money to buy axes and other tools to build a log cabin where we could picnic and huddle over a stove in winter. This was eventually abandoned, and a different group and I acquired another hut, built of clapboards and known as Drag Inn, where we went to smoke. I had started smoking, partly as a protest against school rules, at the age of fifteen. There were certain hiding places where one went for a furtive puff, like the boiler room and a tunnel with several bends that ran underground from the school to the infirmary. I continued smoking until the age of twenty-two, when I managed to give it up with considerable difficulty.

  I took university entrance exams a few months after my father died, but failed to pass in enough subjects. The History exam in which I should have done best I messed up through too much knowledge and too little discipline. One of my set texts that year had been the History of Serbia, and I had read the book so closely that when, as my second question, I started to write on Serbia, I was so carried away by remembered detail and my own arguments that the two-hour examination ended and I was still on the second question, having filled many pages and forgotten to look at the time. The examiner made allowances and gave me a bare pass, which was not enough to bring up my general level on all subjects and compensate for the worst ones. As a result, I repeated the year in a special class at McGill University in Montreal, designed for people like me, which gave the benefit of first-year university together with the opportunity to take again the examinations in which I had failed. It worked and I passed.

  The war was now nearing its end, and I expected to join the army. The school, BCS, had a
cadet corps, and I had done all the basic training to enable me to be a qualified sergeant. Two of my school friends had enlisted quickly and were as quickly killed, but I was now at McGill, so the year passed and the war in Europe ended. I went on a troopship, as a passenger, to see my grandparents in Scotland. We were crammed six into a cabin normally designed for two, but it was better than steerage, sleeping in hammocks. The Gaffer’s main concern was that I should enter the Alloa brewery as soon as possible. He had changed little, was now well into his eighties, still running a chain of hotels as well as the brewery, where his principal fellow director, soon to be managing director, was Sir John Gilmour, a baronet who was also the Conservative MP for East Fife. During my fortnight at Ardargie I came down to breakfast one morning, followed a minute later by my grandfather.

  “Was that you who left the light on in the red bathroom?” he asked.

  “Yes, Gaffer,” I said. “I suppose it was. I’ll go back and turn it off.”

  “I’ve done that,” he said, and, after a pause: “If I’d left the light on my father would have told me the first time. The second time he would have disinherited me.”

  I returned to Canada just as the Hiroshima bomb brought the war to an end. I registered at Sir George Williams College in Montreal, where I took both day and night courses, largely in the social sciences, and came out with very high marks, thanks partly to some extra tuition from a lecturer there called Joseph Zweig. The year at McGill had been interesting, because for the first time in my life I was mixing with people from very different backgrounds to mine, Canadians from different Montreal communities, many from immigrant groups and some from the Jewish district of East Montreal, whose ideas, ranging from the two-tone jackets that a BCS boy would not be seen dead in to what constituted a good time, were all very different from my own limited and class-ridden experience. I learnt quickly and adapted to this new society, developing a reputation as a humorist because of my way with both written and spoken words. I composed humorous addresses to be read in public which amused my classmates, and discovered a facility for making up jokes on the spot and for puns. “It’s raining cats and dogs,” a classmate said. “Be careful not to step in a poodle,” I countered. At BCS I had been much bullied in the third form and grew more remote from my peers as I progressed through the school, staying out of the schoolboy limelight, having only two or three close friends. I was never made a prefect, never took advantage of my seniority over the junior boys, and became, in the sixth form, school librarian, sharing this office with Philippe Stern, the son of a Parisian banker who had moved to New York before the German occupation. We used the library as the centre of a black market in cigarettes and other unobtainables at a time when the school was in quarantine because of an epidemic. I never had the popularity that belonged to the sports stars, and although I had a few friends, I had become more and more of a loner at Bishop’s. Now, in a very different environment, I became more of an extrovert – even, in some ways, a show-off.

  Montreal had very cold winters and hot summers. I would ski at weekends in the Laurentians at Sainte-Agathe and Mont Saint-Sauveur, swim at summer resorts in lakes in the vicinity of the city and walk a lot. When still at school and during a holiday, a group of us went one night to a brothel, where some kind of sex show was put on for us, during which two girls made love to each other – but we were too nervous to do anything ourselves, perhaps because of the fear of the diseases about which we had been warned at school. I lost my virginity with a cousin, the same Margot Buchanan who had come over to Canada with us, the only Dawson girl who ever married. Her husband, Sandy, had been killed in the war. It happened one summer evening at Estorel, a resort in the Laurentians, where she had taken a chalet. I was staying with her, as was a very attractive lady in her late twenties, called Maxine: we all got drunk together, and I hoped to have an opportunity with the latter. But she preferred another man in the party that night, and so, faute de mieux, I got in bed with Margot. We had been drinking sloe gin, and my hangover the next morning was a tremendous one. My memory of the occasion is otherwise vague. I have never touched sloe gin since.

  Before returning to the subject of sex, I should recount my religious unconversion. At Gilling Castle religion was central to life, and at Ardargie there was even a chapel inside the house, seldom used but consecrated, and always there for personal prayers. The boys at Bishop’s College School were nearly all Protestant and subjected to Church of England rituals and services. The Catholic and Jewish boys only attended the annual Christmas carol service at Bishop’s College, the nearby small university, but otherwise the Catholic boys went to Mass in the village and the Jewish boys to Montreal for the Jewish high holidays, usually claiming that they had to go to town for a dental appointment. At Lennoxville, in the village church, Catholic boys from an English-speaking school were seen as spies from an alien culture. The group of us, varying from three or four to a maximum of seven, depending on the year, would sit together on the back row, bored stiff, waiting for it to end. In Montreal, during the holidays I would go to confession at the cathedral, where it was heard in both languages, but any devoutness I may have had before going to Canada was fast ebbing. My reading was more widespread and mature, furnishing me with new ideas and many doubts. An Irish lady in Montreal, Honor McIntyre, who was certainly in love with my father and had taken an interest in me since my arrival in Canada – and whom my mother despised as “an old maid” – brought me books that were considered daring, about which I would probably not have otherwise heard until years later. I began to explore modern literature through authors like Aldous Huxley. This, more than any peer pressure, was leading me towards independent thinking.

  I had increasing difficulty in understanding the dogma that I had been fed since childhood, and I now began to question it, often in the confession box. The answer was always the same: great minds had thought about such things and come up with the answers – which were now the dogmas we had to believe. Asking by what arguments and thought processes the great minds (Thomas Aquinas in particular was often cited) had come up with the answers we had to believe got me nowhere. An exasperated priest sent me to a Monseigneur, who in no way satisfied me better, and finally at the age of fifteen I was sent to see a Jesuit bishop at the cathedral of St Jacques in Montreal. I was ushered into a large room and told to sit in a chair at one end of it. At the other, seated behind a large desk, was the Bishop, signing letters. After a few minutes he looked up, beckoned for me to come forward, and I stood in front of him while he looked me up and down.

  “Why are you here?” he asked.

  “I think Monseigneur Mitchell has written to you,” I said. “He thinks you might be able to answer some problems that puzzle me.”

  He found a letter on his desk, read it quickly, asked me a few brief questions about myself, and said, very nonchalantly, “Some people have to leave the Church, and you’re one of them. Good morning!”

  I was stunned, and went out into the sunlight not believing my ears. I had been expelled from the Roman Catholic Church. For a few days it worried me, then I forgot about it. I kept this incident to myself for many years, went through the rituals of attending Mass when the family required it, especially in Scotland, and on only one occasion, as an adult and at a moment of extreme grief, did I ever seek comfort in religion, and that only for a few hours.

  * * *

  At twelve years old, during my stay at the Atholl Palace Hotel in Pitlochry, I was very struck by the appearance of a very pretty blonde girl of about my own age, but never even spoke to her. My feelings were no doubt the same as those of Dante when he saw Beatrice on the bridge in Florence. During my teens I admired and was attracted to different women with whom I came into contact, usually in their twenties, but could only fantasize about a physical relationship. I went out with a few girls in Montreal and eventually developed a chaste but fairly passionate relationship with a girl called Lorraine Morgan, the daughter of friends
of my mother, but not close friends. She came from the French-Canadian community, and was totally bilingual. We spoke English, except occasionally when with other people. I took her to films, the theatre (for which Montreal was not particularly well served), to restaurants of course, and we began going to dances, especially on Saturday nights, to the Victoria Palace, where the black jazz pianist Oscar Petersen played with a dance band. There were professional hockey matches, wrestling and boxing matches at the Montreal forum to which everyone went as a matter of course, but by fifteen I was thoroughly bored with all spectator sports. My interest in music was now very great, and I went to such concerts as there were and to my first two operas, Hansel and Gretel and Fidelio. I knew more about music in theory than in practice, and was reading as many books about the subject as possible. Ernest Newman’s Beethoven the Creator, devoted mainly to three works written in 1806, told me all about Fidelio, so that when I finally had the chance to see the opera I was fully prepared. I could not understand why the emotions I expected to feel at the key moments were not there. The performance, by a touring company, may have been a poor one, but I remember my disappointment, similar to Proust’s when he sees, after much anticipation, La Berma’s Phèdre.