IV.             Canada

There is not much for me to say about my being an Anglo-Indian in Canada. There were few awkward explanations to be given of my ethnicity and persons who asked were curious, not uppity or resentful The personal account which follows of my almost fifty years in Canada will show that Anglo-Indians can fit happily into Canadian society. Of course, I do not speak for all Anglo-Indians and my case history may not be typical; so much depends on time and place, on the nature of work and work-mates, and on the personality of the individual Anglo-Indian. One hears of Anglo-Indians who have done well in other countries, particularly Australia. I believe they got a fair shake in Canada.

It was in May of 1953 that I arrived in Vancouver, B.C.  There were pages of Teachers Wanted ads in the newspapers. The one that took my fancy was the vacancy for a teacher of English in Prince Rupert, a dashing Royalist name, conjuring up handsome heads with curling locks and charging cavalry. I had no idea it was a mill and fishing town way up the West Coast. The other application I made was to the Nanaimo School Board. The principal of the Prince Rupert high school offered me a job, so I did not pursue the Nanaimo application. 

Meanwhile I had to support myself until school began in September. There are lumber mills in Vancouver and I made for one, counting on my Orick experience. One of the stations on the green chain was being handled by a Sikh, who was very surprised when I inquired of him in Hindi where the boss was and what the conditions of work were.

After working there some weeks I quit the job to go down to Orick to visit my sister. On my return to Vancouver I took a job with Dominion Steel, in the "hot bed", 20 mins. on and 20 mins. off in eight hour shifts. The pay was better at the steel mill than the lumber mill. My job in the hot bed was back up to the man who fed the ever growing ribbon of red hot steel writhing at my feet and which had had started as an ingot from the furnace, through a number of different size apertures in the press. I used tongs to grab the red ribbon, taking my cue from the worker I was helping, and moved the steel forward as he fitted the leading end of the ribbon into the aperture in the press.

As a teacher in England I had belonged to the National Union of Teachers; in Vancouver I was introduced to Canadian Unions, first The Wood Workers of America, and next, The Steel Workers of America. I attended union meetings faithfully, as I had in England, where I supported the Labour Party. One union outing featured Paul Robeson, the singer. Union members from the U.S.A. and Canada gathered at the Peace Arch on the U.S. / Canadian border. At that time Robeson's passport had been confiscated, so he could not enter Canada. He sang into a microphone mounted in the back of a pick-up truck. I had long wanted to hear Robeson sing.

Later, I became a member of the B.C. Federation of Teachers, and later still a member of the Ontario Federation of Teachers. Although I was a union member all my working life, I was never on strike, not for a single day. I was relieved I never had to make a decision to walk out on the students I taught.

These few months in Vancouver I was at my low point. I had an upstairs room in a private house and I lived out of a bed and a chest of drawers. I was able to continue sending money to Olive and I told her of my living conditions, adding that I was less unhappy in the rooming house than I had been in my own home in Shoreham-by-Sea. I saved enough money to visit my sister once more before taking up my teaching position in Prince Rupert.

One incident of this time scared me. I was in a section of Dominion Steel making pipe line, when I was flashed by a welding torch. That night I woke to burning eyes and was alarmed when the wall in front of me kept climbing; that is, a red band would work its way from the bottom to the top of the wall. Was I going blind? It was early morning, still dawn, when I searched for the Emergency Admission at St. Paul's Hospital. My walk down the cement paths of the hospital was more of a reel. On seeing a nun approaching I staggered up to her. She recoiled, thinking I was a drunk who might insult her. When she heard I was looking for Emergency, her demeanour changed and she led me there. The effects of the flash gradually wore off and I was able to return home, finish my sleep, and go to work for the evening shift. I filled out a report of the incident in case there was more lasting damage. Luckily, up to now there has been none.

The Booth Memorial High School in Prince Rupert turned out to be a good place to teach. There was a thriving democratic spirit in the place, where many senior students had summer jobs and were more or less independent. Some of the senior boys had their own cars, paid for from their own earnings. The more adventurous of these had raised the money or the credit to hire a gillnetter and fishing gear and had fished all summer, taking care of the equipment and sometimes working thirty or more hours at a stretch, when the fish were hitting. The good fishermen among them earned twice as much as a teacher.

Teaching at Booth Memorial was as much "teaching with" than "teaching down." Prince Rupert was an out-of-the-way place and a good many of the teaching staff had, washed up there, rather like the driftwood on Orick beach. They were a tolerant bunch, as though the rough edges and pettinesses had been knocked off them by being flung on waves and rolled on sand or pebbles.

By Christmas of 1954, when I went down to Orick for the holidays, I was fairly solidly on my feet again. I had continued to support Olive and I had a visit from an Immigration Officer, connected in ways unknown to me with Olive's having seen Canadian Immigration in London, England. About this time Olive wrote that she wanted a divorce. I was more than willing for Olive to have the house and all its contents, and on those conditions Olive started divorce proceedings.

The spring of 1954 saw a new direction to my life. Since the beginning of the school year at Booth Memorial a friendship that had grown between Rose Bancroft, also a member of the teaching staff, and me became a love relationship.  The summer that followed I lived at the home of Rose's parents in Vancouver and we visited my sister in Orick together. With divorce proceedings under way, I ended the financial support I had been giving Olive. In due course the divorce became legal.

Olive and I had been through a lot together, bound in ways that were at once rewarding yet hurtful, and our relationship had been a stern but necessary training for me, knocking me off the perch from which I had presumptuously thought to set the world right. Overall, we helped each other and went our separate ways. Olive had what she had long wanted, her own home, nicely furnished - she had developed an obsession to have a nice home ever since her disappointment at Cracknell’s home, for which she had given up nursing and her parents’ home - visits from her children and grandchild, and eventually her parents, who had been estranged from her since her marriage to Cracknell, and who came to live with her for their final years.

Rose and I took an apartment in downtown Vancouver. I taught in a school in West Vancouver for a year, then applied for a teaching post in Thorold, Ontario. We moved to Ontario in 1956. In 1961 I moved again, this time to Agincourt, a suburb of Toronto. By the time I began teaching at Agincourt Collegiate in 1961 Rose and I had five children Emily, Norma, Walter, Hilda and Ernest (Ernie).

The boat Rose and I had set out in had acquired passengers who were also crew. They had been marvellous years for me, nor did the good times cease. Along came Audrey, Joan, Bobbi and Shanti, making it nine children in all. How could a man who had come so close to making a mess of his world have come to such happiness? Sure I had had many good intentions, but that, as is well known, is the road to hell. And sure I had often displayed character weaknesses to which the mess could have been attributed. It wasn't I who had secured the ship and kept it on course - it was Rose.

In Thorold I started taking university courses and over the years upgraded my Calcutta University B.A. (Hons.) to the equivalent of an Honours degree of a Canadian University, then went on to an M.A. in English and an M.Ed. in Special Education. I went into Special Education with the idea of being able to help Bobbi, our eighth child and sixth daughter, who was born with Down Syndrome.

Some summers I earned money by marking Grade 13 examination papers. Other summers I took courses, which were an expense but which led to my obtaining a Specialist Certificate (English) and a higher rate of pay and eventually to my being given a Head of Department (English) position, which also meant more in wages. Improving my educational qualifications and getting promotions would never have been possible in England during the time I was there. The teacher from Christ's Hospital was right.

In the mid-60's I was invited to teach a summer course in Althouse, London to students studying for teacher certification, and I did this for four consecutive summers. The money I earned helped with family vacations, mostly to Myrtle Beach, S.C.. In 1970 I dropped out of school by taking a job with the Ontario Ministry of Education in the Correspondence Courses Division. There were some 40 applicants for the job. I was no longer in classrooms but I continued work in secondary school education. I retired at the end of 1983 as an Education Officer of the Ontario Ministry of Education at the age of 60.

For a while I marked papers for Correspondence Courses, but that came to an end when I underwent surgery to repair an aorta aneurysm, the first major breakdown of my body. Before the aneurysm came the greatest blow of my life up to that point: our daughter Bobbi died. The heart condition which had been part of the Down Syndrome caught up with her. She was 16 years of age. That was the first light to go out. That was in 1984. Some years later our daughter Audrey died while giving birth to her third child. This was a much greater shock than Bobbi' s going because Bob had a congenital heart defect and had had two major heart surgeries and we knew her life span would be a short one, whereas Audrey's death came while she was in good health and flourishing. Moreover, Audrey left two very young children.

Our youngest daughter, Shanti, and her boy friend moved in with Audrey's widower, Perry, to look after Audrey's children. Shanti was then in her second year at York University, Toronto. She stayed out 1 1/2 years at a crucial time in the lives of Audrey's children, then resumed her studies, first half-time and then full-time, until Perry's household was being reorganized to adjust to his second marriage.

The deaths of our two children caused all our family deep grief and we shall never cease to mourn them. However, they lived full and happy lives - "in small proportions life may perfect be" - and from the dark place where they are they shed a kindly inner light on us.

My career in school was gratifying, but not without incident. I cared for the high school students I taught and was exhilarated by their good external examination results in Grade 13. At Thorold High School I took on the extra-curricular task of producing the school plays, which added rewards to my job as a teacher. At Sir John A. MacDonald Collegiate in Scarborough I was drawn to defend a student who had criticised his education in the school newspaper and was being victimized at an assembly in the school auditorium. For this I was summoned to the Board Headoffice where the Director of Education berated me. I told him I could not keep silent while a student was being singled out and jeered at by some of the students. “Did you think”, fired the Director. “of the harm that student was doing the school?” He followed that by the question, “Would you do it again?” to which I responded “Yes”. I did not remain a teacher with the Scarborough School Board long after that interview and that was when I applied for a post with the Ontario Ministry of Education and became an Education Officer.

Our family ship has, so to speak, charted many waters and visited many lands, without, so far (as of April 2007), being wrecked. As the grandchildren arrive, twenty-six of them, the ship has become a fleet. The old mother-ship is mostly at anchor now, but still serving as home base for the vessels coming and going. If and when the need arises for the mother ship to be manned by others, it is my belief those others from the family will be there to keep the family ship afloat. I cannot leave this memoir without paying a tribute to my wife, Rose. She counts herself a “mug”, coming as she does from the potteries of the English Midlands. It is ironic that I, who was never a school prefect, married the head girl of an English Grammar school, and it is ironic that she, who was told by her head mistress, ”you are not the marrying kind” should have become the mother of nine children. Rose had made all the difference. The title of my memoir might well be THE LUCK OF AN ANGLO-INDIAN!