Our Brief Return to England

When we got back to England, all Hell broke loose. For starters, my dad had bought a car. We had never had a car before and of course Dad bought a lemon. Mom was not amused. And to add injury to insult, he had also bought a house. Mom was...well, "livid" is too tame a word. "Volcanic" might come closer to describing the expression of her feelings.

We had been living in a three-storey duplex (semi-detached) in suburban Coventry. We were now obligated to move into a small town outside of Coventry. The town has probably been absorbed into the city by now, but then, it was more or less out in the boonies. The house was a decorator's nightmare, though structurally sound. By the time my parents had knocked out a couple of walls and repainted and papered the whole place, it was pronounced "livable" by Mom. The whole process took about a year. There were a few adventures along the way--I don't know why they decided to wallpaper some of the ceilings in the house, but they did, and the process was fraught with humourous accidents, like the five little holes in the spare bedroom "ceilingpaper," caused by my dad's fingers as he tried to hold it up with one hand and smooth it with the tool in the other. And the time the poor guy was stuck in the attic for hours because the trunk he was trying to drag up the ladder was heavy enough to move the latter out of reach. Oh, and I mustn't forget the time that the Minister came by at about the same time my dad got home from work, and I flung open the front door and launched myself at him from a bench that stood right inside the door. He was a tad disconcerted.

It was a nice neighbourhood. I had a good friend there; there were nice places to 'splore. I hated my school, but the presence of my friend, going through the same purgatory, made it bearable.

I was in no way prepared when Dad came home from work one day, and said to Mom, "How would you like to chuck it all and go back to Canada?" One look at her face as she said, "Oh, YES!" and, even at seven years old, I knew my life was toast.