Oh, he was open enough about the factual elements of his past. She knew his parents’ names, where they lived, where Chris had gone to school and so on.
But one evening, after the two of them had said their goodnights, she reflected on the conversation they’d had over dinner, and suddenly grasped what was missing from it.
He never spoke about his feelings. Not regarding his boyhood, anyway. Not about the past at all, in fact. With a slight shock she realised she had no idea if he had been a happy child or not, or what he thought of his parents. He simply didn’t say. More to the point, he avoided saying. What could it mean?
As the months went by, the studied casualness he always displayed over these matters began to unsettle her. She confided in her mother Barbara.
‘It’s not that I believe he’s hiding something horrible, Mother. I don’t think he has some awful dark secret or anything like that. But I can tell he’s unsure and unhappy about something, and I’m more and more certain it’s somehow to do with his family in England. I want to help him but I don’t know what to say or do.’
Barbara regarded her eldest daughter calmly. ‘You must get him completely on his own, choose your moment, and ask him outright. You’ll get your answer, dear–either by what he says, or what he doesn’t say.’
The following weekend Chris, on Mary Claire’s suggestion, hired a small motor launch and the two of them went out for the day on Lake Erie. It was now humid, sultry summer but they were cooled by the breeze puffing across the water. They ate their lunch as the little boat rocked in the slight swell of the great inland sea, and after a long companionable silence, Mary Claire decided the moment had come.
‘Darling…what is it you won’t tell me about your childhood, your life back at Shawbury?’
Years later my father would describe the question as like a door swinging open before him; a doorway he could shun or pass through. The choice was his.
He turned to look towards the distant shoreline, and then back at the eyes of the young woman looking solemnly into his own. The moment held itself in perfect balance a while longer and then gently dipped under his decision.
‘Well…this will probably sound…I don’t know. I’ve never spoken to a soul about it, but…’
For the first time in his life, hesitatingly, Chris began to describe the doubts and fears and disappointments that had haunted him for as long as he could remember. As his fiancée listened in silence, the lake murmured its accompaniment.
A dark tide that had begun to run nearly half a century earlier, flooding through two lives, father’s and son’s, was at last about to turn.
Chris’s childhood was, to Mary Claire, a bewildering contrast to her own happy, freewheeling Canadian upbringing. She could see at once that her future father-in-law had been savagely assaulted by fate, but her concern now was to free his son from what seemed to her like something close to a curse. She realised the young man she had agreed to marry had had no working model, no template, on which to base their future family life together.
So the McEwans unselfconsciously presented him with their own example. It was to be his salvation. And, ultimately, up to a point, mine.
Mary Claire’s kid brother Bailey was barely a fortnight old when Chris walked into my mother’s family home at 174 Broadway for the first time. Her younger sister Barbara-Ann was fifteen. Mary Claire was eighteen, and the oldest child, Malcolm, twenty-two. Their mother, Barbara, was in her early forties and father Hector had just turned fifty. It was a vibrant family that cheerfully spanned five decades; a typical and triumphant product of the modern North American way–confident, affluent (Hector owned a garage and Barbara ran a hair salon), forward-looking and relaxed.
Chris had never been in a house like it. The McEwan home seemed to glow with emotional warmth. Perhaps that was because women were a strong presence–a mother and two daughters outnumbered and outgunned the men and Chris marvelled at the loving, playful atmosphere that surged around him whenever he visited his fiancée. He didn’t realise it then, but his emotional DNA was being subtly re-engineered by the McEwans’ family chemistry. Their immediate unfeigned fondness for him astounded him. These were people who spontaneously kissed and hugged each other, and the young Englishman found himself the new object of their warm familiarity.
My father told me he experienced more demonstrative affection in one week in Tillsonburg than he had known in his entire life in Shawbury. At first he was startled and confused by the experience; quickly he came to love it. And them.
My father was most fascinated by Hector’s behaviour. On weekend visits to the McEwan home, Dad would sit pretending to read a newspaper while covertly observing his future father-in-law’s playful exchanges with his children as they came and went. Malcolm, though now in his early twenties, was still hugged, kissed or playfully wrestled with. Chris was astounded. Watching such overt demonstrations of affection was almost like learning a new language.
The girls were kissed and teased too, and Bailey was everyone’s darling, swept through the house in the interchangeable arms of his siblings or parents. If the baby had been an accidental and tardy addition to the family, he was clearly a welcome one.
It is impossible to overemphasise the critical importance of this period for my father. It may have been very late in the day, and his epiphany came not a moment too soon, but he was being presented with a model lesson in how to play happy families. Demonstrably, showing and receiving love and affection was normal. The more he observed it, the easier it looked. And not only that: the little clan on Broadway continued to make their growing affection for him abundantly plain. Mary Claire had confided in her mother and Barbara went out of her way to make the young Englishman feel loved and welcomed into the family. His confidence soared.
It was wonderful. It was a revelation. It was, as I say, my father’s salvation. But he still carried his interior scars. They would never be completely healed.
Chris and Mary Claire were married in Tillsonburg on 13 October 1951. The bridegroom was twenty-three, the bride nineteen. He cocked up his wedding vows, saying: ‘I hereby troth thee my plight’ and she was not allowed even a thimbleful of champagne at the reception. Mary Claire was old enough to get married but, under Canada’s strict alcohol prohibitions, too young to drink.
She was old enough to bear children too. My mother fell pregnant almost at once and ten months later gave birth to a daughter–Elizabeth Barbara Madeley. Telegrams were sent: mother and baby doing fine.
But the father wasn’t. Chris was still desperately thin and working extra shifts for his newspaper to earn enough to keep his little family. He was exhausted after eighteen-hour days and seemed to have no resistance to infections. Heavy smoking didn’t help and after a vicious bout of bronchitis his new wife took charge.
‘We can’t carry on like this, Chris. You’re going to wear yourself out. You are worn out. And Elizabeth and I hardly ever see you. We have to think of something else.’
My father nodded. ‘All right. But what? It took me months to get the job I have now.’
The couple both had aunts living in Windsor, the big industrial city which stared across the border into America and ‘Motown’–Detroit. My mother considered this a while, and then seized the moment.
‘Let’s go to Windsor–today, right now. There’s plenty of work there and we can stay with our aunts while we get fixed up.’
And so my slightly bewildered father found himself catching the last train from Tillsonburg that evening with his wife and baby, headed for the US border and Windsor, Ontario. Next morning the couple walked into the city’s Employment Centre and walked out with job interviews at the giant Ford of Canada plant. An hour later they were on the payroll–Mary Claire was assigned to production planning, Chris, with his journalistic experience, to the communications department, in effect, the press office. He would work for Ford in public relations until the day he died.
Once again Mary Claire was my father’s saviour. With ki
nder hours and better pay he began finally to put on some weight, and he was energised and uplifted by the turn their lives had taken.
He also had more time to spend getting to know his growing daughter. My mother says he was an infinitely gentle, tender father. Like all new fathers he had to feel his way, but he had very little experience from his own childhood to call on. He had to rely on what he’d learned in the McEwan family home. That, as it turned out, served well enough.
But my mother says he seemed to have an instinct for it anyway. Becoming a father was enormously important to him. I think he felt fatherhood, and marriage, defined him properly for the first time in his life.
But, as well as learning to define himself, Chris was also attempting to define his wife. She had harboured thoughts of returning to the stage, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Today, we might call his attitude ‘controlling’.
My father met my mother when she was playing the female lead in a light romantic comedy, and it had involved some stage kisses. This was all very well then; now she was his wife, he could not bear the thought of her in the arms of another man. And it might not just be as part of a local amateur production–a casting agent who had seen my mother’s work wanted to represent her professionally. Who knew where that might lead? And with whom?
It would not be the first time in her marriage that Mary Claire was forced to ponder the implications of her wedding-day vow to ‘obey’ her husband.
Mostly, the pledge was not invoked. But occasionally my father’s insecurities surfaced and he restricted her. It was an issue that affected many women of my mother’s generation, and one that would not be confronted until the rise of feminism.
So she renounced any remaining ambitions to pursue a theatrical career, telling friends she was happy to be a wife and mother. Although this was not without a large degree of truth, there was definitely an element of pretence. Years later, when she wanted to drive, my father refused to allow it, even though she had passed her test as a teenager in Canada and was confident she would pass a UK examination. My mother told everyone that it was a matter of cost, but again this was only partly true. The main issue was her husband’s superstitious fear that a driving wife might just one day drive away from him for good.
She was quite unable to reassure him that this was nonsense, any more than she had been able to convince him she had no intention of running off with her next leading man. Her eventual response was to accede gracefully to his demand. Recently I asked her why.
‘It was partly the times, Richard,’ she told me. ‘Things were just…different for women like me then. But also I simply didn’t want to make him unhappy.
‘Yes, I wanted to act and I wanted to drive–quite badly sometimes–but not that badly, you see. We were so happy together and, anyway, I’d known he was insecure when I married him, hadn’t I? He’d told me everything. I loved that I had managed to take some of that insecurity away and make him stronger. Why would I want to endanger that?’
I hope he knew how lucky he was. I think so.
If Chris looked out of his new office window he could see straight into the smokestacks of mighty Detroit across the narrows that marked the Canadian–US border. He began to think about transferring to America. The pay was better, opportunities were greater…why not?
Because of my mother’s teeth.
Mary Claire cleared away her husband’s supper plate in the kitchen of their little flat in Windsor, checked the baby–now more of a toddler–was still asleep, and cleared her throat. She had been dreading this conversation since getting the news that afternoon, but it had to be had.
‘Darling…you know I went to the dentist today.’
‘Sure, honey.’ After several years in Canada, Chris now spoke in an unaffected North American accent.
‘Well…it’s not good news.’
‘What? You’re not ill with something, are you?’
Mary Claire shook her head. ‘No, it’s not anything serious…just expensive. He told me I have to have all my teeth out–all of them, Chris–and have false ones made and it’s going to cost a thousand dollars!’ She burst into tears.
Chris was aghast. ‘But of course that’s serious! We haven’t got a thousand dollars. We haven’t got a hundred dollars. Christ, it’d be cheaper to take a boat to England and get you fixed on the National Health!’
Mary Claire looked up. ‘You’re not serious.’
‘Well, no…I mean, yes, it’s true, we could get you seen to for free in England, but I didn’t mean…I wasn’t actually suggesting…’
They stared at each other. Mary Claire spoke first.
‘There’s many a true word spoken in jest. I think you might be on to something. Let’s sleep on it, shall we?’
And so it was that at the beginning of August 1954 my parents and their two-year-old daughter boarded the Empress of France at Montreal. They were to stay in England for a year, as an experiment. It seemed silly to go all that way just for a visit to the dentist. Maybe they might like to settle there.
The Empress of France cast off, bound for Liverpool. But Liverpool was not their final destination.
My father was taking his young family home.
Back to Kiln Farm.
The voyage got off to an exciting start. With Elizabeth safely asleep in their cabin, the couple went on deck to watch the tugs tow the liner out into the St Lawrence River. Chris wanted to take photographs of them but his wife kept standing in his way. Finally, in mock frustration, he grasped her by the waist and pretended he was about to throw her overboard.
The strange woman wearing near-identical clothes to Mary Claire struggled free. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’
Chris gaped in horror. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry…I thought you were my wife.’
That’s how Dad used to tell it, anyway; my mother insists he only shouted in mock anger at the woman, thinking it was her. Either way, both agreed that the stranger never let my mother out of her sight whenever she came on deck. She clearly thought she was in mortal danger from a homicidal husband.
As I say, the decision to sail for England was not based solely on Mary Claire’s dental dilemma. Once the initial idea had taken root other reasons surfaced. Britain was finally moving out of years of austerity; rationing was almost at an end and after four years away Chris realised he was homesick. Mary Claire, though nervous about emigrating and convinced she would miss her mother terribly (indeed she did–they wrote to each other every single day and the entire McEwan clan came over from Tillsonburg to visit) had long been something of an Anglophile and was intensely curious to see the country of her husband’s birth.
The decision was sealed by the news that Ford had an opening in their British press office. The job was Chris’s if he wanted it.
It seemed like fate.
My mother remembers that their ship docked in Liverpool on 8 August. When she told me this during my research for this book, I gently corrected her.
‘No, Mum, the eighth of August is the date Dad died.’
There was a pause. ‘Yes it was,’ she said, her Canadian accent thickening as it always does at emotional moments. ‘But it was also the date I landed with him in England all those years before. Good Lord. It never struck me until now. How strange.’
My father never returned to Canada. Neither, during their marriage, did his wife, except to be at her mother’s bedside ten years later when she died.
Less than two years after arriving in Britain, my mother gave birth to me. Chris now had a son, and a slew of renewed self-doubt assailed him.
He had, over the previous four years, been a gentle and loving father to his daughter. Indeed, against all his expectations, he had found fatherhood relatively easy. His epiphany at the McEwan home had stood him in good stead; Chris had learned his lessons there well.
But what if this were different? What if it was different with sons? What if all that rejection and emotional frigidity with his father had tainted him in some way? What if the cold pa
st returned to warp and chill the relationship with his own boy?
All his old doubts and fears and uncertainties rushed back. Poor Dad.
I can conjure up his pale face now, staring at his reflection in the shaving mirror the morning after I was born, a question running through his head just as it had Geoffrey’s more than thirty years before, when Kitty presented him with their first child.
But the question troubling Christopher was subtly different. He had so far succeeded in being a good father–to his daughter. But now there was a son in his house. What sort of a father would he make to him?
Chapter 8
ESSEX BOY
The Shropshire Madeleys arrived in force at Liverpool to greet their wandering son and his new bride and child. It was practically a committee that stood patiently on the wharf waiting for the Empress of France to disgorge its passengers. Geoffrey and Kitty were there, as was Chris’s elder brother Jim, with his new wife Hilda. Hilda was very pretty, with brown curls, astonishingly bright eyes and very neat white teeth. She came from Market Drayton and she and Jim had married after Chris had emigrated. Both brothers would shortly be meeting the other’s new bride for the first time.
Meanwhile, in the unloading sheds opposite, Chris and Mary Claire’s luggage–everything they had in the world–had vanished without trace and their little girl was flushed and unwell. My mother, weak from calamitous seasickness which had plagued her during the entire voyage, recognised her in-laws from photographs but her husband had disappeared in pursuit of their missing trunks and she was too nervous to approach her new family alone.
One of them gave an uncertain wave of half-recognition. She burst into tears and fled to the back of the shed.
Later, after the drive down to Shawbury, Elizabeth, who had been increasingly restless, suddenly went into a sharp decline. The doctor was called out. His diagnosis seemed strangely and ominously fateful. On this, her very first night at Kiln Farm, Elizabeth had been struck down by precisely the same illness that had stolen John from his parents nearly thirty years before–bronchial pneumonia. The little girl was even lying in the same bedroom where the small boy had been propped up on his pillows the night before he died. A frisson of superstitious dread rippled through everyone.
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