Looking back over 80-plus years, it is enlightening to reflect on the people who were part of my life, some for a brief interlude, some for decades, many who faded completely from my life, becoming ghostly images. Only a tiny cohort was crucial to my journey, but they made it meaningful and satisfying.
My mother and father come to mind of course, but not in the way one would expect. My father was 58 when I was born, my mother, 36. I lived with them and my brothers for 13 years before our family split apart in 1949.
What I remember was a father beaten by life, most of it his own fault. He had grown up in a well-to-do family with a single mother and an enterprising, bachelor uncle, who was an entrepreneur, and farmer. Born in 1878, he was spoiled, and pampered from birth by his mother and uncle. He had never learned how to work, or do anything useful, nor was he obligated to do so. He spent his time indulging himself in trivial pursuits until his life started going downhill. The neighbours eventually nicknamed him Dudey, a fitting name.
He met my mother just after the Great Depression, somewhere around 1933 when she came to be his housemaid. He was already on a downward spiral, and not far off from losing part of the once-prosperous farm left to him by his uncle. Shortly after I was born (1936) he was forced to sell the better half of the farm containing his large home and farm buildings, to settle debts, and move the family across the road to the other half of his farm, and into the tiny house formerly occupied by one of his farm hands.
My father gradually became a withdrawn, discouraged figure who appeared to go through the motions of living. Over the duration of my childhood, any spark of love that may have existed between my parents was replaced by one of smouldering silence. He never possessed the doggedness to pull his family out of its economic downturn, and so let it defeat him. He made minimal effort to share family responsibilities with my mother. We grew up in what had become a poverty-stricken household with only the bare necessities of life, after my father was forced to find a menial job as an elevator operator at a plant in Cornwall.
Two recollections as to how unmotivated my father was, had no impact on me at the time. The timber that he had purchased for a future barn he intended to build on his remaining land lay slowly rotting in the tall grass behind our little house. His old Ford car sat abandoned in the front yard, all tires flattened. I do not remember him ever driving it, or it ever leaving the yard. We used it as our playscape, climbing in and out of the windows and pretending to drive it. He hitch-hiked each Sunday night into Cornwall, 12 miles away, where he boarded and went to his job.
