The hotel was American courteous efficiency at its best. It took Canadian dollars at par, had a varied children’s menu in a cheerful restaurant, and came equipped with a magnificent indoor pool. Paul’s spirits lifted as he swam and plunged, and the boys splashed at the shallow end. Later, in the soft pools of light in the spacious room they shared, Paul, in bed with P.D. James, dozed over his book, while the boys watched an improving National Geographic special from their own bed.
On their way to Fort Ticonderoga the next morning, Paul got lost, and asked the way of a state trooper on his motorbike.
‘Saint Alban’s, huh?’ said the policeman, eyeing Aiden’s T-shirt, ‘I used to live there. Nice place. Then I got transferred here. You folks from there?’
‘Ah, no,’ said Paul, realizing he had confused the name of their church with the name of a small town in Vermont, ‘just visiting. Is this the road to the Interstate?’ It was, and they were on their way again.
But the early morning sunshine gave way to heavy cloud. It became oppressively dark, and began to spit rain, not the most auspicious weather in which to explore the grounds of a fort. The boys were lost in their own thoughts. Not even the playing of a tape of a Roald Dahl story relieved an atmosphere grown tense with gloom. Perhaps they too were brooding over the imminent anniversary. Paul asked about school, but the answers were brief and inconclusive. He lapsed into silence, the only sounds the rhythmic clunk of the windshield wipers and swish of tires in the rain, until it mercifully stopped minutes from their destination.
They clambered over the earthworks of the fort, and surveyed the countryside from the walls above. Paul told his sons something of Ticonderoga’s history, stressing its strategic importance on a waterway at different times to France, Britain, and the United States. Montcalm, Amherst, Washington and Ethan Allen had been visitors here. He recalled doing something similar on an earlier trip to Bosworth Field in England where Richard III had come to an untimely end in 1485, but Sam had been with them then…
Rain soon forced them indoors, where they were regaled with a gruesome display of instruments of barbaric punishment in the fort’s museum. In the adjoining shop, Paul bought the boys a bow-and-arrow set each, cautioning them not to aim at human targets, quoting Shakespeare in admonitory support: ‘I have shot mine arrow over the house, and hurt my brother.’
The drive back home was long, but uneventful. The boys, silently preoccupied for much of the way, helped unpack, and went to bed early, as the next day was school again. With a heavy sigh, Paul sat down to an hour’s postponed marking of Grade XI papers.
