A year later, all this was far behind him. The Whitgift family was in Halifax, Nova Scotia, as a result of George’s third overseas posting. The children were beginning to settle into new schools, and to adapt to a climate of extremes when they were uprooted yet again, this time to Don Mills, as a result of an unexpected promotion for George. His job would now involve a great deal of travel across North America and liaison with federal and provincial government officials. The children saw their dad most weekends, but their mother, at best a querulous, anxious woman, soon began to show signs of nervous strain during her husband’s absences, and home became a place of tension. The girls in particular were often in conflict with their mother over relatively trivial matters of what used to be called dress and deportment. Ian himself ran afoul of his mother’s uncertain temper when he invited Peggy, a pretty girl besotted with his accent that he had met at church over to his house ‘for tea,’ unaware that his mother had gone shopping with his sisters. When she returned, she ordered the girl out, and complained to George that she had found ‘a strange girl’ there without her permission. This was particularly unjust, Ian felt, as she had seen ‘the girl’ many times at the altar rail, and Peggy’s mother was a stalwart of the diocesan Women’s Institute. George took his mother’s side, and forbade visitors to the house without advance notice. To his enduring sadness, Peggy snubbed him after this, and the two never spoke again to each other.
Another incident that estranged son from father took place at the table during dinner, a formal occasion as always for what his mother called ‘intelligent conversation.’ With adolescent enthusiasm, Ian told his family about a documentary he had recently seen on television, in which a popular writer lauded in the press for his charitable work with victims of domestic abuse was interviewed about his recent ‘tell-all’ autobiography. In this book, he had spoken of his eventual triumph over the circumstances of his traumatic, even Dickensian, upbringing in squalor and deprivation at the hands of a brutal guardian. As Ian described with forgivable relish the conditions under which the young man said he had had to live, George interrupted him.
“That’s enough, Ian.”
“But these things really happened!”
“So he says. But they are unseemly, and not fit for the dinner table.”
Indignant, Ian retorted, “You can’t hide from the ugliness of life. You’ve said so yourself.”
“These things are private, not for public consumption. You don’t wash your dirty linen in public. Only narcissists and exhibitionists do that. A Spartan does not. There are some things you just don’t talk about. Least said, soonest mended. As for these—these acts of charity you are so taken with, they merely make him a do-gooder…”
“Isn’t that what you were, in the London slums, doing good, as a Scout should?”
George hesitated. “It’s not the same thing.”
“How is it not?”
“You know I don’t like discord in this house,” said his mother. “I am feeling unwell. You must get your own dessert.” She burst into tears and left the table.
