I was the fourth of the five Sinclair girls, “the Brawling Sinclairs” as my father used to call us. Each of us competed for my father’s love and attention, and all of us adored our mother. There were all the jealousies you would expect to find among so many sisters. We did everything as a family. My father took pride in the racket and the standing of such a respectably large group—even if we were all girls.
My eldest sister, Heather, who was seven years older than me, mothered me, as is often the case in large families. Jan was next, and the eldest of the middle three sisters, who were each just fifteen months apart in age—making for a lot of sibling rivalry and conflict. Jan had a lively wit and a wicked tongue, and she was always interested in social issues. At first, she was a red-haired, freckled, wild-tempered tomboy, but later she became a great beauty. Jan and I have always been especially close, and we have remained so, through thick and thin. Lin would become a beauty queen (Miss Simon Fraser), but more often than not had her nose buried in a book. Betsy, the youngest by four years, was my father’s favourite, with her blond hair and features so like my mother’s. My father used to joke that when Betsy grew up, he was going to turn my mother in and marry Betsy. She was the baby we all loved.
All of these strong women, along with my strong mother and father, were my net, my underpinnings. In some ways, I’m closer to my friends than I am to my family. I choose friends, after all. But my family was and is critically important to me.
As for young Margaret, well, I was not an easy child. I remember an incident that occurred when I was six years old. I was terribly stressed because I was thinking, for the first time in my life, about infinity and mortality. I couldn’t sleep; my mind was on fire.
“What’s wrong?” my mother asked. “Why are you so agitated?”
I blamed Daddy. This was a school night, and my mother had gone out to play bridge with friends. My father—on babysitting duty—had let us watch television, then available only in black and white. He never much liked TV, didn’t understand it, and normally it stayed off on weeknights. On weekends, we would watch Lawrence Welk, Perry Como, The Ed Sullivan Show and a drama set in Quebec called The Plouffe Family. The paucity of television never bothered us because we were a family of readers, voracious readers.
But this evening he had let us watch The Hound of the Baskervilles, and the dogs really, really scared me. I had also seen coverage of a plane crash earlier and I knew that my father was heading off shortly to Russia on a diplomatic mission. What if Daddy crashed? What if he died? What if? My mind was on fire with these thoughts.
My father had always longed for a boy, and I was as close to a son as he got. My sisters were all going to succeed in their own particular ways, but I was the one he singled out, the one with the extra spark, the child most like him. My mother considered me the most selfish of the family—and she was probably right.
My father treated us all much like boys on the Saturdays he was at home, when our tasks might include helping him lay a new patio for the house or planting roses in the garden during one of his spring work bees. Especially after he left politics in 1958, his do-it-yourself projects grew more ambitious—the former minister of fisheries, for example, painted a magnificent mural of fish on the swimming pool’s retainer wall.
Mine was a healthy, loving childhood for the most part. But when my moods grew too agitated and I was overexcited, I was sent to my room and told to stay there until I had a “better attitude.” I wonder now what there was in a little girl’s room that could have helped me deal with these raging emotions.
I was always showing off and asking questions. To please my mother, I learned a lesson that would, paradoxically, only make my later life much worse: I understood that I would be loved only if I learned to suppress my emotions and become a pleasing little girl. I was not to mention to anyone these wild and terrifying thoughts that constantly raced through my mind. Instilled in me was the need to please and be approved of. I felt loved, but I also felt different, different from my sisters, and often very lonely. My rebelliousness began to simmer.
Even as a small child, my thoughts would race ahead and I would say things without thinking them through and then find myself miserable and embarrassed. One day, when I was about seven, my teacher decided to teach us the musical notes by getting us to sing out phrases to match their rhythm. She chanted out a sequence and one little girl put up her hand: “I love you.” The teacher beamed. Then came a second, somewhat longer, sequence. I put up my own hand: “I do not love you.” I was made to stand in the corner, feeling humiliated. I had meant no harm; the words had just leapt out.
Dad was keen to turn us into healthy, vigorous children, and more than happy to leave culture to later days. The result was a curiously barren childhood in one way—no ballet lessons, no serious music, no art. The only music he enjoyed was the bagpipes.
The dinner table was where we were expected to learn about life and what it meant to be a family, but the noise was overpowering as everyone tried to compete for Daddy’s attention. Only my mother stayed silent. As I grew older, I found the racket nearly intolerable. As a treat, my father would take us all out to a nearby restaurant, where we were so unbelievably loud that I would cringe with embarrassment. At these dinners I developed my hatred for labels.
“And this,” he would declare to anyone listening, pointing at me, “is number four.”
“No,” I wanted to yell back. “I’m not number four. I’m Margaret!”
We may have lacked a grounding in the arts and culture, but exposure to nature we got in spades. When John Diefenbaker brought the Conservatives back into power in 1958, my father left politics. He bought a plot of land in North Vancouver and built his dream house at the end of a dead-end street on the edge of a ravine with a view down the creek. Our first summer was spent damming the creek and building a path to the artificial pool. What a fiasco—after we all fell ill, it was discovered that “the creek” was actually one of North Vancouver’s hidden sewers.
But the creek got cleaned up and the dream house felt like a dream house once more. Ours was a ranch-style frame house, split-level, with a pool and a patio, a bedroom for each of the girls, a fancy kitchen and a splendid view of the harbour.
Soon after, my father bought a second house, an old cabin up on Hollyburn Mountain, Vancouver’s northernmost mountain, with spectacular views of the Georgia Strait, the Gulf Islands and Grouse Mountain. The cabin had no running water or electricity and was set deep in the forest, surrounded by fir trees, pines and blueberry bushes. There were mountain lakes all around and, in winter, deep snow, which we gathered in buckets and melted down for water. We named the cabin High Hopes, after a song sung by Frank Sinatra in the 1959 film A Hole in the Head. The song, in part about an ambitious and hardworking ant achieving the impossible (“Oops, there goes another rubber tree plant” is the refrain), perfectly described the spirit and location of our old round-log cabin.
My father and mother had spent time in their youth at ski clubs. Hollyburn was their mountain, the scene of their romance, and what was sacred to them would become sacred to their daughters. Every weekend we either took the chair lift up the mountain or hiked with our provisions on our backs. The log cabin offered the dream life for my father. He loved chopping wood and laughing with his girls. We liked the simple and the real. During the day, we hiked, cross-country skied and tobogganed. At night, we played games—hearts, whist, crazy eights, cribbage and Monopoly. My father loved Scrabble; the game gave us all a taste for words.
My father’s virtual son, I became a tomboy, building forts in the woods and having adventures on the lakes. These were happy times. The five girls slept in a dormitory in the cabin’s attic, and on the wood stove there was always a pot of soup simmering for when we came in cold from the woods. “Mountain soup,” as we called it, was a blend of tomato soup, Lipton’s onion soup and beef consommé, eaten with bread. (With some adjustments—I lose the Lipton’s and substitute natural ingredients—
I still make that soup.) The cabin on the mountain was the best gift my father ever gave our family. I’m sure he thought the cabin was a way of keeping the family all together, and of keeping an eye on his daughters.
We all felt safe there, and we were—most of the time. On one occasion, a black bear wandered onto the front porch and got into some of Dad’s preserves. Some tins contained peaches, some oil, and the bear loved the peaches and loathed the oil. The latter made him furious, and he began to wreck things on the porch and toss the tins of oil as far as he could (which was far) into the bush.
I look back on all the fun we had at the cabin and I’m reminded of the folly of thinking we have our children for a long time. We parents should make the most of our brief time with our children. I love families that are strong and interactive and almost exclusive, because their priorities are right. By the age of seven, we’ve already lost our children to their peers. My father and mother were so right to give us a connection with nature through that cabin. I’ve never lost that attraction. When I go on speaking tours, I’ll look for places to run or walk—the river and park in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, or the dikes at Wolfville, Nova Scotia. I continue to feel this need to get in touch with nature.
As I grew older and became more self-aware, I discovered in myself a great fear of hostility and confrontation, which would leave me cowed and subdued. I remember much laughter and many tears as I engaged in sibling rivalry. My cousins were mainly other girls, and growing up in this exclusively female atmosphere only intensified my desire to make something of my life. Equality of the sexes and the importance of education were a given in our household. There was no question: I would go to university and find a career. The Sinclair sisters were not going to learn to type, for my father maintained that typing would invariably lead to our finding jobs as secretaries, a thought he deplored. He did, however, approve of my learning to cook and sew in home economics class.
When I was sixteen, I was chosen by my high school, Del-brook Senior Secondary, to represent it on the teen fashion council of the Hudson’s Bay Company. One girl from every school in the city spent Saturday mornings listening to a model talk about grooming and poise and charm; afternoons were devoted to helping out in the different departments of the store. I wore a neat little uniform and prided myself on my weekly paycheque and the charm with which I handled the customers. When someone on staff suggested that I think of a post as a trainee store manager, I reacted strongly: I did indeed have a working life ahead of me, but not in a department store.
I had something far more glamorous in mind—writing stories as a foreign correspondent, perhaps, or travelling the world as an ambassador. I had seen for myself the interesting life women with their own careers led, and I resolved that whatever else might happen to me, I would have a serious working life of my own.
A good friend once described me as “every guy’s great date.” He meant to flatter me, but the fact is I never much enjoyed dating. My parents wouldn’t let us start until we reached grade ten, and then, like my sisters and their friends before me, I commenced the round of chaperoned Saturday-night parties, hand holding after school, long, intense telephone conversations and the wearing of special signs and tokens that meant a girl was going steady with a boy. But from the start, I always seemed to get something wrong. Perhaps because I had no brothers, I could never see boys as friends.
With my intense desire to please, I never wanted to offend anyone, so rather than fight to keep my clothes on in the back of someone’s car, I preferred to skip casual dates and link myself to one boy for as long as possible. But it didn’t stop me from being a terrible flirt. I look back and I see that I was a highly sexualized teenager.
With my father’s encouragement—he promised Lin and me a car if we went there—I applied to the newly opened Simon Fraser University and we duly took possession of a beige 1966 Volkswagen Beetle. Simon Fraser had been built on the top of a mountain overlooking Vancouver, and the long, winding road that led up to it added to a sense of remoteness and isolation. The campus was all concrete and glass, and because Vancouver is a rainy city, it was grey, always grey. My first year was merely a continuation of my school days. I was a good student, I dated a football player and I won a first-class scholarship, which delighted my father. All through our childhood I can remember him repeating, again and again, that with good education and good manners there would be no doors that would not be open to us.
My second year at university, 1966, everything changed. I was studying political science, anthropology and sociology (mostly the latter) and was soon deep in the political dramas and tensions of the time, outraged by the spectacle of American soldiers in Vietnam and eager to seek out gurus in mysticism and freedom. Only later would I learn that sleeping well, eating well and working hard were important to balance my polarized emotions. My moods had more or less been kept in balance by the sense of discipline and order in our house.
My emotions began to slip out of control, distorted further by lack of sleep and the wrong kind of food—steamed cafeteria food, hamburgers, junk. What I now understand is that there was almost no margin of error in my brain chemistry balance. Bad food was one factor that helped derail me. There were others.
Caught up in the student movement of the late 1960s, I railed against poverty and injustice, watched the news coverage of Vietnamese children fleeing the napalm and fantasized constantly about changing the world. Sad spectacles plunged me into excessive misery; excitement fired me to great heights.
My first real love around this time was Phil Stanworth, a graduate student in sociology and a teaching assistant. His long hair and English accent irritated my father, who thought of him as a “limey outside agitator.” My father’s disapproval did not upset me too much as he was always gruff with our boyfriends and protective of his girls. Phil taught me how to study, how to question, how to think.
My education was now taking place continuously both inside and outside the classroom. On the faculty, there were Marxists and Maoists, Liberals and Trotskyites—many of them misfits and miscreants who had been kicked out of Berkeley and Columbia—and we talked and talked and talked. Stuck away on that grey and windswept mountain arguing through the night with brilliant people was a wonderful way to spend a year growing up. That year changed me. But I never quite got away from being more spectator than participant. Just as at school I had always refused to become a cheerleader, so now I didn’t join the other students in their sit-ins. I didn’t want to be a sheep among leftists, any more than I wanted to be one among conformists. I began to question things in a way I never had before.
And, like many of us who grew up in the 1960s, I was drawn to the drug and rock-and-roll culture all around me. The Beatles had come to Vancouver when I was sixteen, and I had found their songs and lyrics overwhelmingly exciting. Smoking marijuana was something we students were beginning to do, and we thought there was nothing wrong with it. One day I went with friends to a cottage near the sea, where the gulls screeched at us over our heads. We sat on the beach for hour after hour, listening to “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever,” and when it rained we retreated inside and watched the spray hitting the window panes.
Because I was the newest arrival, I cooked the meals. Getting marijuana was easy; some grew dope in their gardens. But at the cottage I tried a hard drug, mescaline. I watched the veins in my hands stand out, saw visions of blood flowing and wonderful colours, and for a while I sat in a tree and wished that I was a bird. I really thought that I was opening the doors of perception, the ones that William Blake and Aldous Huxley had written about, and that I would find the secret to love, peace and compassion. This was exciting, as everything was exciting in those days, but I did not particularly want to try that drug again. I did go on smoking marijuana, though, and I must have left a few marijuana seeds in a shoebox in my cupboard. My mother chanced across them and asked me why I was keeping a stash of dried old mistletoe seeds.
In my last years at un
iversity I would study the English Romantic poets—Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Wordsworth. I realized then I should have been studying them all along. I was trying to expand my consciousness, and these brilliant poets with their mythic imaginations were helping me on my way. The poetry and letters of Keats just sang to me, and forty-three years later I still have his work by my bed. Keats believed that we should embrace the world, even its contradictions, and that mysteries abound beyond our ken.
In this confused, excited, cheerful state of mind, full of hope for the future but deeply unsure of what that might be, I set off for what my father suspected would be our last holiday together as a family. Our destination that Christmas of 1967 was Club Med on the island of Moorea in Tahiti. There I met and began dating a good-looking Frenchman called Yves Lewis, whose grandfather was one of the founders of the Club Med empire and who was on Moorea to teach water-skiing (he was the French national champion) during a year away from school. At sunset, the guests would have their happy hour and Yves would put on a demonstration of all he could do on skis out on the bay, including barefoot skiing. Yves could do it all, and he was the best in every skiing category.
He was twenty-one and dazzling in so many ways, with his green eyes, silvery blond hair, bronzed body and degree in sociology from the Sorbonne. Yves was also a gifted flautist and danced the traditional Tahitian dance, the tamure, so skilfully that even the Tahitians stopped to admire his form. He was quite mesmerizing, though modest and aloof at the same time.
One very hot afternoon after I had been water-skiing, I stayed out on a raft, resting and looking out at the white beach and the green palm trees. I observed a man slalom-skiing in the bay, and I followed his progress idly, impressed by his grace and skill and the huge walls of water he was casting up as he cut back and forth across the wake of the boat. Later, he joined me on the raft and we started to talk.
Changing My Mind Page 2