A Nice Life

We had a pretty nice life there in England. From my point of view, anyway. We had a nice house, in a nice community; I went to a nice school, I had a nice friend. My parents had lots of friends, and there were aunts and uncles and cousins galore. So why leave?

My dad had never finished school. He had been attending Blundell's, a good prep school, when his dad's business went bust in the Depression. (Yes, Virginia, the was a Depression in England, too.) Dad's father wanted him to go into the army when it became clear that they couldn't afford for him to continue at school, but Dad didn't want to. He left home and moved to London, where he found work and a social life. He told me that he had a girlfriend who was a paid companion to a society lady, and Dad was the only person the girl knew who owned a tux and a tailcoat, so he got invited to all sorts of functions as the companion's companion. For some reason, he got tired of all that, and decided to homestead in Canada. That's where he met Mom, and started working for Courtauld's. When the two of them moved back to England in 1937, he transferred to Courtauld's in Coventry. By the time he decided to "chuck it all" and go back to Canada, he had gone about as far as he could go. Younger men with more education were being promoted over his head, and he was sick of it.

Growing into awareness in England, I never really realized that Mom wasn't English. She spoke just like everyone else, and what other criteria did I have to judge? She had told me she was born in America, but that meant nothing to me. I guess I didn't fully grasp the fact until that fateful day when Dad asked her if she'd like to go back to Canada, and I saw the longing on her face. She had done her job and been a proper middle-class English lady for 20 years, and was ready to quit.

There was no help to be had. "You'll love it," they said. "You'll make new friends," they said. "We'll keep in touch with all your aunts and uncles and cousins," they said. "It will be exciting," they said. I didn't believe a word of it. Anger set in that stayed until I was grown and moved out of the house, and then some.

Because life in Canada did not turn out to be quite the sort of adventure they thought it would be!