I feel that just about everything in my life
has changed. I have settled in Montreal, having arrived back after three months
in Dubrovnik, Croatia, visiting a friend. I left Montreal (where I arrived to
live first in 1957), in 1975 to go back to New Zealand, the land of my birth.
When I returned to Canada in 1976, disappointed in New Zealand I guess you
could say, I went to live in Ottawa, where I have lived for the last 35 years.
Accustomed though I had become to Ottawa, the
suggestion of one of my sons, Thom, that I might find Montreal more interesting
prompted me to make a move. I had thought about moving back to Montreal when I
had sold my house a few years back, but decided that it would be one move more
than I could comfortably handle at the time. So two moves later, through
apartments in Ottawa, I have finally made the move, and promise to be well
contented with it.
My wife Shirley died in 2007, after almost 57
years of marriage, and I have found a new partner, Sheila van Bloemen, a woman
of my own age, with whom I have been exchanging visits for the last couple of
years, and she is proving to be an excellent, indeed, irreplaceable and indispensible companion in my old age. She has a gift for
display and interior house arrangement, and she has by some miracle managed to
fit all the stuff I have hung on to during these three moves into a
one-bedroomed apartment on the fifteenth floor of a building overlooking
downtown Montreal. We sit on our balcony every morning watching spectacular
sunrises, and today we walked on what is laughingly called The Mountain ---
Parc Mont-Royal --- which is only two or three blocks above where we live.
I have unreservedly happy memories of my first
18-year domicile in Montreal (although eight years of that were spent in
London, England, where I was correspondent for The Montreal Star. Still, during those eight years I was in
constant touch with the city of Montreal, in one way or another, and these were
the best working years I have ever spent. I was extremely fortunate that The Star was a newspaper of a
conservative bent, that was prepared to accept copy from its correspondent, the
content of which didn’t bother them unduly, as long as it arrived on time and
in a regular fashion. I have often remarked since that the job in London was
the best in journalism: the office never bothered me, allowed me to write about
whatever subject took my fancy, the deadlines were totally favourable, giving
me the leisure to write at my own speed and in my own time, and in those days,
the money was good because of the imbalance at the time between the Canadian
and British currencies. There was also some sort of reciprocal arrangement between
the two countries which allowed me to pay tax only on the part of my salary
that I brought into the UK, which turned out to be an immense advantage.
Added to that was the sheer delight of writing
about London in the 1960s, years of experimentation and change in Britain, as
it struggled to come to terms with its declining influence in the world.
I have to say, however, that the moment I
returned to Montreal, where I was directly under the thumb of bosses who were
worried about what appeared on the subject of Montreal and its politics, the
freedom of action and expression I had enjoyed in London no longer applied.
Fortunately, I got interested in the subject of native people in Canada, was
given the freedom to travel anywhere across the country that took my fancy
(partly, I think, because they were happy to see the back of me in the office:
once in Alaska, I couldn’t be upsetting the Montreal city fathers, in those
days synonymous with Jean Drapeau, the man who said the 1976 Olympics could no
more lose money than he could have a baby.) Anyway, although I no more liked
the owners and bosses of The Montreal Star
than I had of any other paper I worked for, when I look back at them they seem
like a lot of decent, bumbling vicars compared with the thugs who run the media
these days. And the existence of the Star
as an independent newspaper was an important element in the life-style of
English Montreal. In summary, if I now carried any sense of animosity towards the paper that employed me
for 14 years in Montreal I would deserve to be called a monstrous ingrate. And
I carry no such animosity.
I quit the paper, not in the happiest of
circumstances, in 1971, a parting of the ways that was written in the sky,
inevitable, given my attitude towards newspaoers and all their works. It was a
risky thing to do, since I had four small children, and little prospect of
making a living as a freelance writer. To my great good fortune, a chance
encounter with Colin Low at the National Film Board got me started doing
research for them, which developed into their unaccountable and ultra-generous
offer that I should become involved in the actual making of films, and
henceforth, for nearly 20 years, I managed to eke out a living making films,
writing books, and writing other things, doing research and the like. I left
Montreal to fulfil the foolhardy and age-old dream of immigrants, that is, to
return to their country of origin, an enterprise that, I am sure fails in more
than 90 per cent of cases, as it did in mine.
While in Montreal I had subjected my children
to what was, in essence, a political experiment, which was to place them in the
French Catholic school system, in the belief that that would be their best and
surest method of learning French. They were tossed into it, almost the only
English-speaking kids in their schools at the time, without knowing a word of
French, and they had a hard time of it. The stories of being locked in rooms
with the janitors as punishment for their unresponsiveness, of being beaten up
in the playgrounds, and so on, still bother my conscience to this day. When I returned to Canada, I decided I did
not want to subject them to more of that, so I relocated to Ottawa, from which,
only two hours drive away, I could commute to work in Montreal. (I may say, in
parenthesis, that my children all still speak French, which is evidence that
some good came out of the experience I subjected them to, though at a rather
high cost, to them, although not to me.)
Okay, so here I am back in this wonderful city. I am slowly
exploring the many new things that have been built, and feeling once again,
that warmth of the people, which never failed me in the past, and has delighted
me in my first two weeks back. I came across one wondrous change in the city
block that lies alongside Place des Arts on the west side. The whole block has
been refashioned as an open-air spot for concerts and performances, and in
those moments when it is not so engaged, it has been made over into a fantasia
of fountains, stretching from one end of the block to the other. It is fascinating to sit beside
these fountains, dozens of them, most of them small spouts of water coming up
and down according to some preprogrammed timetable, at one point turning into a
joyous, jumping cornucopia of fountains that look as if they have lost control
in their delight in living, while a huge tower of water in the centre rises,
surrounded by these jumping, wild smaller fountains. This installation is a
veritable fantasy, amazing, and whoever visualized and created it deserves the
utmost credit.
Hi Boyce,
ReplyDeleteGlad to hear you're doing well. I always love my visits to Montreal (and it's been too long since I've been there), and it's good to hear the city still has its drawing power.
Dana Magliari