schools of the district.
What I loved best about outings away from town were the woodlands and patchwork fields and old castle ruins we’d pass on the train. I vividly remember a school outing we took to a medieval site, a sacred place whose ancient stone buildings held the relics of saints as well as marvelous swords encrusted with jewels. These spoke to me of another time and place, sacred and mysterious in a way that our own lives weren’t.
In Woolton Village I found grasses and trees again in Woolton Woods, a park just up the hill from our house. It had open fields we kids could run in and a woodland with wide pathways through it. In autumn my brothers and I would gather up huge piles of leaves and bury ourselves inside them, becoming leaf people. Tree children. Somewhere beyond the trees there was an area of gardens with a large floral clock as its centerpiece. Though first dazzled by it, I came to dislike the clock, its fussy Edwardian ingenuity. The woods and fields were what called to me. At eight years of age I was already confronted with primitive forms of the timeless questions of how nature, art, and gardening intersect. There was an artificial cuckoo sound that I associate with the clock. I remember hearing the cuckoo sound while walking with my parents through the woods to see the gardens. “Oh, listen! Do you hear the cuckoo?” said my parents, laughing. But I soon figured out it wasn’t a real cuckoo and I resented its fake intrusion into the woods. I wanted a living cuckoo to be singing from the trees. I wanted the mystery and wildness of a real wood with real creatures in it, not a park with high palings all around it and a foppish floral clock at its center. Why would you want a clock in a woodland anyway, a place that should be too primal to be measured or divided, a place, as John Fowles wrote in The Tree, “teeming, jewel-like, self-involved, rich in secrets just below the threshold of our adult human senses.” My child’s heart knew instinctively the secrets of trees, and already back then I may have set my sights upon living among them.
Then, suddenly, a seismic shift. Just as we’d left the fields and trees and animals of Knowle Park five years earlier, now a second great change was about to occur: a decision had been made that our family would leave England entirely, leave behind the crowded houses of Merseyside and everything we’d known there, to start a new life in Canada.
We could never have loved the earth so well
if we had had no childhood in it.
GEORGE ELIOT, The Mill on the Floss
IN 1954 MY FATHER LEFT my mother and us four boys in Woolton and sailed off to the faraway land of Canada. The plan was that he would find work and save every penny toward buying a house to which we would all move in a year or so. Not everyone approved of the scheme. One of the teachers at our school voiced what others were likely thinking: that this was reckless foolhardiness on his part, that he was bound to fail as other dreamers had failed before him, and that he’d be back in no time with his grand dreams crushed and his tail between his legs.
But at home we entertained no doubts. As my mother wrote to my dad during their long separation: “the boys still go [to Mass] most days. They are all keeping well and talking of Canada and I get tired of their questions. They do try to be as good as they can. I am sure you will be very glad to see them all again . . .We shall be glad to get word from you to cross, we’ll lose no time in getting out of this place.” All my hopes and yearnings were of leaving grimy old Merseyside for the wild excitement of what people still called the New World. The Canada I dreamed of moving to was a vast land of forested wilderness. Television helped stoke the fantasy. One of our favorite shows on the BBC at that time was called The Cabin in the Clearing, in which a pioneer couple and their brave daughter, Alice, were repeatedly menaced by wild animals and besieged in their isolated log cabin by murderous Shawnee Indians. I fantasized being with them in the wilderness, protecting pretty Alice from the perils that beset her. One evening, after much pleading, our mother allowed us kids to stay up past our normal bedtime to watch a TV special featuring “the singing rage Miss Patti Page.” Fetchingly dressed in a buckskin outfit, perfectly pert and blond and American, she seemed to me the most beautiful woman imaginable singing the most heartrending songs I’d ever heard. And she lived across the ocean, in the land where our father already was and we would soon be.
Finally, in early 1955, a letter arrived with the joyous news we’d awaited so long—our dad had bought a house! He enclosed several small black and white snapshots of what looked to us like an imposing wooden home on a considerable estate. As my mother had promised, we lost no time in disposing of our possessions and preparing to leave in the first week of May, even though this meant abandoning school before our terms were completed. The mid-fifties were the final days when transatlantic liners still were a cheaper alternative to airline travel, so we would take a boat to Canada. Berthed at the Liverpool docks, the Cunard Line ship seemed to me a truly magnificent ocean liner. My earlier fears over boarding the Mersey ferry were long gone, and as the great vessel was pulled away from the wharf and made its way out into the Irish Sea I was filled with a thrilling sense of adventure. As twilight descended, my brothers and I stood at the stern of the boat and watched the twinkling lights of Liverpool slowly fade and vanish into the darkness. We were leaving once and for all; the past was behind us and ahead lay unimagined possibilities.
Everything was changed on that voyage. There was no Mass to attend in the morning, or any school all day. We ate our meals in a plush dining room, served by an acerbic waiter. Not long into the voyage, our mother succumbed to seasickness that confined her to her bunk. We kids were free to roam, make pals with other kids, and get into whatever mischief offered itself, mostly by poking around areas of the ship we were not supposed to enter. Though our mum tried her best to maintain some discipline, we were experiencing a freedom we’d never known before, unhampered by any realization of how temporary a state of affairs this was. The latter part of the voyage involved much watching for icebergs and a collective anxiety that we not suffer the same fate as the Titanic.
Then the great excitement of first sighting land. We gathered at the railings and made out on the far horizon a low gray smudge. Cruising up the Saint Lawrence River offered a stunning validation of all my expectations. Forests and farms stretched away from either shore. Wooded hillsides rose beyond. Kids paddled out in canoes to wave greetings to us and ride the wake of our great ship’s passing. What a brilliant, wild, wide-open place we’d arrived at!
We disembarked at Montreal and took a train to Toronto. Again, I thrilled to mile after mile of woodlands, farms, lakes, and rivers. We pulled into Union Station in Toronto and wandered together into the waiting crowd. Suddenly a man burst forward and clasped us all in his arms. It was our dad, though he seemed almost a stranger, it had been so long since we’d seen him.
When we got to our new home it was in fact not a country estate, and certainly no cabin in a clearing, but a modest little two-story clapboard house on a city lot in the town of Weston on the outskirts of Toronto. But, wonder of wonders, there were trees growing on the lot, our very own trees—a row of scraggly evergreens out front and several big shade trees in the backyard. The whole neighborhood seemed dominated by enormous spreading trees. Although we were in a new country, with neither relatives nor friends, this appeared to me a far more green and pleasant land than the dreary treeless streets of Woolton Village we’d left behind. Paradoxically, our emigration seemed to me more coming home than exile.
