Beginning An Old Spy Yarn ... Sheritt A Spy Story

Preface

The turn of the century has come and gone. As I write this we are well into 2008, my children have grown and gone off, each having the lives they want for themselves and hopefully getting to do, in some measure, what it was that I got to do. I have extended family that stretches from Australia, through South Africa and across Europe and North America. My business now has nothing to do with my early years during the decade of the 1970’s. Today I am a therapist and help people sort through their life’s conundrums. But when I was young I had a different life, I had a different dream about what I wanted to do and I was fortunate enough to get a chance to lead that life for a space in time.

It was a life where up was down and what you saw was not what was there to be seen. It was very tricky; it was a confined little world; it was very slippery, and could be deadly at times. It was filled with smoke and mirrors and it could have prolonged periods of boredom that could drive you up the wall to the point of distraction and then shift gears suddenly to flood you with a few brief moments of sheer terror so intense that you would wish to hell that you had never ever got yourself in ‘this position’ in the first place. For a young man of my age... mid 20’s, this was the place to be. For those romantics out there it had the combined attraction of being the leading edge in both mystery and mystique.

I was in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Service and I got to do what I had dreamt about doing all through my teen years. Ian Fleming’s 007/Bond books intrigued me to no end during my high school years. From Fleming I forged on into all the facets of spy vs. spy. If it came down to a push comes to shove, then either Len Deighton or John le Carré write the best trade craft.

Reading and daydreaming about the cloak-and-dagger world that they wrote about held my focus through that entire phase of my growing up. It was a world I longed to get into but a world that I had no idea where the entry point was. It was a secret world with a secret entrance. At the time I had no idea that James Bond was modeled after a Canadian from Winnipeg. Sir William Samuel Stephenson, CC, MC, DFC, (January 23, 1897 – January 31, 1989) who was a Canadian soldier, airman, businessman, inventor, spymaster, and the senior representative of British intelligence for the entire western hemisphere during World War II. Stephenson is best-known by his wartime intelligence code name of Intrepid. But I learned.

After I completed basic training with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police at “P” Division in Alberta, I was posted to ‘D” Division, and more precisely Winnipeg Sub/Div and the Rural Detachment at Portage la Prairie, Manitoba. The detachment had its offices behind the head offices of Chicken Delight on Saskatchewan Avenue. The gentleman, the owner of Chicken Delight Canada, parked his Rolls Royce alongside our Highway Patrol black and white cruisers in the dirt lot at the side of the office. The Rolls had had a moment in the spot light it had once been owned by Gordon Sinclair . There were six of us there on detachment a Sergeant, a stenographer, and four constables; I was junior man on detachment.

It was here when and where I discovered one of the portals into the world of spy vs. spy. It was at the Tasty Bakery right next to the Detachment offices that provided me the opportunity to step across into the world of counter-intelligence.

I came to learn that it was an insidious little world. It operated in plain sight for anyone who cared to notice but most did not; it was a world within a world that loped along in a rather sinister fashion unbeknown to most.

One spring day two fellows turned up at the front counter of our office. They looked like cops, they were in street clothes and maybe not cops at all, but they just had that look about them. I went to see if I could help or be of assistance. One of these guys replied that they wanted to speak to the senior constable. They called him by his Christian name and when Don heard his name he came out of the back room. It was like old home week; these guys were obviously one of the boys. They were invited in and disappeared with Don into the deeper bowels of the detachment. Coffee time came and as usual we all trooped right next door to the Tasty Bakery for coffee and a freshly made Bismarck .

It was here that I overheard that these mysterious visitors were in S & I, Security and Intel for the uninitiated. They worked on the Cuban Desk, whatever the hell that meant, but I was hooked. That coffee and donuts chance encounter started me in a direction that would lead me to a place where I would spend the next decade of my life getting to do what it was that I had always fantasized doing.

I got to catch spies for a living.

Imagine that, getting to live your wildest imagined flights of fancy. There I was, from 1971 through to 1979, right in the middle of the cold war both internationally and within the framework of Canada. I was working on issues that would be discussed on the floor of the House of Commons and doing things that would to some degree shift the direction history would take, sometimes ever so slightly and sometimes on a much larger scale.

It was my grandson who asked me one day, “Papa what did you do way back then?” That got me thinking about all the crazy things we did.

First, he wanted to know more about his papa and all children love to have stories told to them.

Second, I had always wanted to write, but I thought my mild dyslexia would prevent me from doing so. God bless the invention of the computer and spell check.

Third, my actual attempt(s) at writing the all-encompassing Canadian spy novel was a more daunting task than I ever imagined.

My first problem was I could not, for the life of me, get past page three. I just froze up there, the story died on the page with try after try. Then I heard a CBC interview with JK Rowling by Michael Enright. She was pumping one of her Harry Potter novels just before Christmas. She said during the interview with Enright that she was struggling with resolving a character in the midst of either her third or fourth book that was still on the drawing board. It struck me during the course of that interview that she really had no idea exactly where the character was going; she was just writing the story as she heard it in her head. That interview gave me the key. I realized I didn’t need to plan every detail before I wrote it. Over that Xmas period I simply sat down at the computer and wrote a 158-page outline of Sheritt, A Spy Story.

I simply let it flow.

It was a wonderful thing to experience; the secret to writing was not to try too hard.

The story was there to be told. I did not have to invent, although invention was very much a part of the process. All I had to do was to set the spinning wheel spinning. To paraphrase and adapt Nike, “Just Tell It”.

But true to the tradecraft and the traditions of the genre I mixed metaphors, of both whimsy and truth, about people both real and imagined to come to a place of telling, “Papa what did you do way back then?”

I am one of the fortunate souls who got the opportunity to chase after their dreams. There are people I would like to thank.

For those people who go unnamed or name-changed to protect the guilty because they lived and worked it too, on both sides of the multi faceted fence. If you are all still alive it would be amusing to get together and tell war stories about the one that got away. We had a reunion of sorts in Vancouver several years ago. An ad hoc event facilitated by one of the guys in a restaurant on King George Highway I think. I walked in and all that I could see was a group of old men seated at a breakfast table; then it struck me ... I was one of those old guys. I still smile at that one.

For those other people who read and re-read this thing with me. All those Sunday afternoons just going over and over one point after another, chasing down facts, all the stuff that goes into writing this type of book. Tait, Adianne, Alexander, Dixie and for Lynne, Charlene, Jennie and Murray T (who passed recently) who gave me encouragement and for all those who just edited it so they could have a look and see what was happening next, I thank you.

This is the beginning of a set of tales first about a wise old native gentleman, very real... who for whatever reason wove his web through my spy catching days. As this tale unwinds it spreads itself out over several stories told in a series of books. This is the first of what I believe will be six possibly seven books telling the three stories.

I am sure the old gentleman is dead because when I knew him he was well into his 80’s and that was in the mid 1970’s. I also know that a number of the players have passed also ... Old age does that to us all. But the joy that I get out of telling a tale or two is simply uplifting. I’ll let my alter ego, Steve; tell the rest of the tale.

Neil Douglas-Tubb

Victoria BC 2011

I Was Young Then

It was late January 1969; I was considerably younger then ... barely out of my teens and it was cold as hell in Manitoba. Hell of a combination. I had heard someplace or other that at its very center, Hell is frozen. I was positive I was there.

“There” in those days was Portage la Prairie Manitoba and as I recall, it was a Sunday night, and the local radio station (CFRY) had announced that we were at -42 F below zero plus wind chill. At that temperature it doesn’t matter Fahrenheit or Celsius (Centigrade) they are both the same reading at that temperature.

As an aside, in the summer of 1969 we stopped an American Tourist (a district attorney from Louisiana... I think Garrison was his name) in a speed trap on the Trans Canada Highway just past the junction of the Yellow Head near the big tree half way to Bagot. He asked us just how cold it got here in the winter ... Dell K piped up with, “I don’t rightly know sir, but if you have to pee outside in January then you have to back up to do it.” That’s how cold it was.

Basically on a night such as this, a member of the RCMP could get himself in trouble by simply driving around ... by being on patrol; so the rule was ... if there is nothing to do, don’t do it out in the middle of a snow storm. Thus we were gathered in the office of the Rural Detachment of the RCMP waiting out our shift, tending to things that needed tending to, playing cards, writing reports, tiding up the office—that sort of thing; basically not doing anything that would come back and bite us.

The phone rang and disturbed our evening. Cst Don C, senior man on duty took the call at the front counter. It took about 4 or 5 min for him to finish whatever it was he was discussing on the phone. Don told us that someone in St Ambroise (Man) wanted to report someone missing. Everyone looked up from what they were doing. This could be serious. Whoever it was that was missing, Don announced, had not been seen for 3 weeks or 4 weeks. Don said there was absolutely no urgency to this because of the time factor and particularly because of the weather; this could wait until the morning. Don was clear; whoever it was that was missing had been missing for weeks ... not hours ... but weeks. Not an urgent matter. So that was that and back to whatever it was that we were doing ... Don told whoever it was on the phone that someone would be in touch in the morning, when the storm had passed.

There was the strongest possibility that the missing man was out on his trap line someplace and that meant he was far away from civilization and deep in the bush. When these men go out on trap lines they often go for weeks if not a month or so at a time. All this could easily mean he was not lost at all but just off in the bush doing his thing.

With all that in hand, Don typed up a C-238 ... an initial complaint form ... to let the day shift know what happened ... and that it was his file to deal with later the next day when he got into the office. Shift change in those days was at 4pm...

We all got back to doing whatever it was that we were doing.

It was blowing like hell outside now ... with the temperature and the wind chill combined it was now affectively more than -60 below zero.

As it turned out, whoever it was that Don talked to on the phone was not a happy camper, so he called the RCMP City Detachment and rattled their cage.

The City Detachment was located in the basement of the City Hall, and a separate entity from the Rural Detachment. S/Sgt Bill M in charge. Whereas we, at the Rural Detachment did not share our space with any level of municipal authority, but instead with Head Office of Chicken Delight Canada at the West end of town and Sgt Chuck (two-gun) H was in charge.

Someone at the city office, probably the desk man, gave our boss’s home phone number out to whoever it was that had called and complained about the missing man ... which was definitely a “no... no.” This was absolutely underhanded and very passive aggressive on the City detachment’s behalf ... they knew that shit would hit the fan ... and it did ... but done is done. It really boiled down to them did not wanting to waste their time handling our stuff.

So in about 10 minutes after Don hung up, a second call came in. Sgt (Two-gun) was on the line and boy was he pissed. He was enquiring, understatement ... just “what the f_ck did we think we were doing?” And that enquiry was followed with a set of orders that were filled with explicative(s) such as “Get your asses the hell out of the office and heading the “f_ck” up to the St Ambroise ... NOW!”

It was further pointed out to us bluntly that we, all of us on duty that evening, would be in his office at 08:30 hours the next morning with a full written report on what the hell happened.

We all knew that Marg, our steno, did not get in until 9 am so it followed that upon our return from the frozen edges of Hades, whenever that was, we would have to sit in the office to the wee small hours of the morning and type out ... an error free by the way ... a report on what transpired.

The trip itself is about 30 km as the crow flies but about 58 km by road.

St Ambroise is dead north of Portage la Prairie on Lake Manitoba’s eastern shore. It is a Métis fishing village. What we were doing was appeasing the complainant, not furthering the cause of justice. It was apparent that Sgt (Two-gun) didn’t really give a dam about the missing person but for some reason he wanted us to kiss the ass of the complainant, so off we went into the night and the storm. This guy was someone important to Sgt (Two-gun) and we had to be seen to do what needed to be done.

One of the quirks about the Federal Civil Service is they don’t insure any of their vehicles ... the Crown is seen to be the underwriter. As a federal vehicle operator ... if you damage it ... you pay for it ... regardless.

So here we go out into a -60 white-out to chase after and try and find someone who is in all probability not lost ... and ... we are doing all this at our own peril. It wasn’t really a snow storm because it was too cold to snow. Actually it was ground drift being blown around by the wind that had come up. But it was a white-out, so basically we were driving by the Braille system. It took us about an hour or better to get to St Ambroise. We met the man who called the office who started this whole thing, standing on the edge of the hwy in the village. He looked about as cold and forlorn as I felt.

He pointed us toward the trapper’s shack up the road. It was in the center of a 10 or so acre open field with a willow bush surrounding on two sides with the shack about in the middle. First things first we searched inside the shack and very quickly it became apparent that he had not been here for some time. There was no heat in the place. It had a wood burning stove and it was frozen solid as was everything else in the cabin. It was obvious the place was empty and had been so for some time. There was a thermometer on the wall near the front and only door and it registered -40 inside the shack; just as cold inside the cabin as it was outside except no wind.

There was one consolation to all this as we headed north on PTH #430 we got ahead of the wind and it was as still as still could be ... the northern lights were alive and dancing in the sky and it was a new moon and in the clarity of the cold and crispness of the evening you could see the Milky Way. It was something Robert Service should have written about.

Anyway, after we searched the shack thoroughly, and by this time a number of villagers had come to see what all the fuss was about, we decided that with their help we would search the yard too. It was a fair sized piece of undisturbed ground/snow so we did it the same way mountain search and rescue search for avalanche victims. Long poles or sticks ... form a line and work our way around the yard using the shack as the center of the hub and until we reached the outside of the property and that was most clearly defined at the back of the property ... where the outhouse was. There were some animal tracks but that was it. So what we did was cut branches from the surrounding willow bush and formed a line and about twelve of us began poking holes in the snow to see what we could find. It was predetermined before we started that if we worked our way out through the yard to the outhouse and not found anything then the search would be called off until tomorrow ... and day light ... and the day shift.

It took about an hour and a half to work our way around the yard. We got to the front door of the outhouse. I had the shovel from the trunk of the PC so I dug it out and Don opened and looked in. No one there, nothing just a very frozen copy of last year’s Eaton’s Catalogue and a very frosty one “holer”.

It was at that point where we had all agreed to call it quits for the night. It was now well after mid night. It was cold as hell and the wind and ground drift had started up.

Don said, “Just a second.” and he waded his way through the waist deep snow, actually the snow was old and crusted so he broke through the crust step by step and then he waded his way to the backside of the outhouse.

All I heard was ... and clearly too was  ... “Oh F_ck!”

My turn, I waded through the snow, in his tracks because he broke the crust and there before us and seated on the wood pile behind the outhouse was our missing man, Mr Alfred D. Deader than a door nail and frozen solid ... I mean hard as a rock; eyes wide open and just staring off toward the western horizon. I commented something to the same effect as Don had done ... “Oh F_ck?” Mine was more a “now what do we do” “Oh F_ck” then it was anything else.

Don filled the space formed by my “Oh F_ck” with, “Call Portage City and get either an ambulance or hearse to come pick this guy up.”

City Detachment radioed back in about five minutes that the ambulance would not come to pick up the nearly departed in this weather because they may be needed for someone alive in Portage.

There were two funeral homes in Portage at the time and one of the owners was dead drunk and his wife would not let him out of house.

As an aside most of the single guys would spend part of their time off at that funeral home in the casket room with this particular proprietor because he was lonely and wanted drinking partners and we were young and broke and could not afford to drink but he could so he supplied it and we kept him company.

There are rumours afoot that a certain member of the Force who later rose high in the commissioned ranks (Assistant Commissioner) was actually locked in a coffin one evening as a practical joke while everyone else who was there got themselves well oiled.

The owner of the second funeral home had a brand new hearse and he was not taking his new hearse out on a night such as this for a 100 km jaunt.

It had come full circle now and we were back to my “Oh F_ck” and what do we do now?

Because of the intense cold and wind chill factor we had left the Police Car running ... standard practice in those days ... for fear if you shut it off and left it, it could freeze up and then you are royally f_cked ...

By the time I got back with the news that we were basically on our own with the dearly departed, Don had pried the gentleman off the wood pile with a crow bar he found in the shed. There he was laying there in a perfect sitting position. Now the solution was both obvious and simple ... if we are getting home this evening/morning this man was travelling with us.

Don said “go roll the windows down in the car,” ... cool it off basically. With the help of several of the villagers we got our man to the car and set him in the back seat ... sitting up of course and strapped in.

Now this is where it gets interesting.

The storm was blowing like hell south of us; raging was the term the dispatcher at the City Detachment called it. Winnipeg AM radio stations were reporting the main hwys closed ... XJL201 ... police radio in Winnipeg (RCMP D Div HQ) confirmed that all unnecessary police travel was to be curtailed forth with. Basically unless it was full blown emergency everyone was grounded. It was just beginning to blow where we were.

It didn’t take long ... everything was done ... the dearly departed was identified by those at the scene... we had his wallet and his out dated drivers licence that said he was who he was reported to be. A family member, his sister I think had identified him to us as being who he was.

There was no indication of foul play in anyway shape or form.

It was now a done deal.

Pictures had been taken ... the scene measured for a plan diagram or sketch should there be a need. “I dent” could come out in the morning if it were thought to be necessary; but like all other HQ vehicles they were grounded by the storm.

Now all we had to do was get our man to the morgue, write it up and go home and sleep a little, then deal with the boss in the morning.

The storm was raging south of us and the wind was picking up where we were. The ground drift was beginning to move the snow into drifts across the hwy. We loaded up and headed south and in a very few moments we were into the storm full force. You could feel the car bucking the snowdrifts across the hwy. The headlights in combination with driving snow made visibility nearly zero to the point it was hard to see the hood ornament of our car (a 1969 Plymouth as I recall). So our progress forward was being measured in speeds of less than 10 mph. The defroster had quit working and we had to keep scraping the frost off of the windshield on the inside of the car. When we got to St Marks corner an apparition jumped out of the snow storm at us. He was dressed in a too small bomber jacket, shoes with no socks ... No hat or toque or gloves but with a large paper bag in his left hand ... it, the bag and probably its contents, obviously came from the liquor store.

We missed him ... Thank God!

Don rolled down his window and had to yell to be heard over the wind, “Where are you goin’?”

Our new found friend said he was headed to Portage to the Native Friendship Center. The Native Friendship Center was still over 40 clicks away. Considering it was well beyond -60 ... and he was drunk and ill clad ... Don said, “Jump in! We’ll give you a ride.”

So the hitchhiker got in the back with his bottle of whatever in the bag. We were off into the storm. It took about an hour and a half to go the 40 clicks. All the way to town we could here our drunken friend mumbling to himself in the back seat.

Don pulled up in front of the Friendship Center. By now it was nearly 3:30 in the morning. Our passenger got out and said in his thick native teeth clinched drawl, “I’d like to thank you yellow stripped bastards for givin’ me a ride to town anyways ... But your friend over dare is no damned good ... he won’t speak to me ... anyways.”

He slammed the door and walked into the Friendship Center complete with his bag of whatever...

We laughed and headed to the hospital.

Dutton Ontario Summer of 1952

When I was Five this was the center of the universe for me...

I would ride my trike up and down the sidewalk ...

Sometimes I would even dare to cross the street.

There was a comic book store, malt shop, dry bar and what not shop ... over there, across the street ... just off to the right in the photo.

Sometimes I would dare to venture out into the unknown and raid the comic books that were set out for strangers to buy.

Then there was the Blue Willow Cafe further along on the same side of the street and it was here that I had my very first piece of Boston Cream Pie. I did not know what they called it back then ... but it was good and it was not until I was 12 before I realized other places served it too ...

It was next to the bicycle shop that Peter owned and that was next to my Grandfather's Hotel (just before you in the photo) ... The McIntyre House  ...

The bicycle shop was run by a very kindly elf of a gentleman ... Peter ... who smoked odd shaped pipes and had numbers tattooed on his inner forearm.

I would not really understand how he got to have the tattoo on his inner arm until long after he was gone.

I got my very first bike from him ... it was red and had solid rubber tires ...

All my bikes and trikes came from his shop until he passed ...

My Grandfather handled all the arrangements. Peter never really seemed to have any family.

And

I was Neil Dougall then ...

That's what they called me ...

I would sit up on the high stool behind the wet bar in the hotel and open bottles of beer for my grandpa who in turn passed them off over the bar to Charlie Rutledge, the man serving the beers to whoever was in the beverage room at the time... and there were days when this place was full to over flowing ...

John Kennth Galibraith talked about the comings and goings both in the Hotel and behind the hotel in his book "The Scotch." I can attest that he did not exaggerate the shinanigans one bit.

The Hotel sold 100,000 gallons of beer a month by bottle ...

Not bad for a town of 786 people ... give or take a few.

And there was nothing my Grandfather could not do ...

And if I wanted something ... he produced it.

Everything from Candy Bars ... to riding on horse drawn hay wagons ... to being able to play, imagine that, playing in a real blacksmith's shop at the back of the hotel ... while Fred, the blacksmith, worked on whatever he did and told me stories.  He would let hit a hammer on the anvil when ever I wanted ...

Imagine that ... I got to watch him shoe horses and on some days a whole bunch of horses.

I can still remember the smells ...

The Kitchen in the Hotel ...

Martha at the stove ...

The smell of chewing tobacco that seemed to predominate all the other smells behind the dry bar ...

The smell of the blacksmith's shop ... the horses ... the hay ... the farmers ...
The smell of Good food wafting from the Kitchen at the back of the Hotel
and
The peach pie that came with ice cream.

That was Dutton Ontario.

All sweet memories for me ...

Life for me then ... was a wonderful place to be,

That was the Summer of 1952.

Where I and it All Started

This is Balaclava Street School ...

I went to kintergarden here... 1952/1953 ... This is on the corner of Balaclava and Malakoff Street St Thomas Ontario Canada ... and this picture shows the boys side of the school yard ... Miss Charleton was the first teacher I meet ... I went in mornings ... and was at home with my mother in the afternoons ...

I was a single child born into a post WWII home. 50 Woodworth Avenue ... St Thomas Ontario ... I planted that tree in the front yard ... I helped build that garage ...

My mom and dad worked for the local utilities company (PUC). That’s where they met. After I arrived on the scene, my mom stayed home with me for about five years. Until I was in grade one and Miss Crone ... she took over from Miss Charleton ...

Mom went back to work when I was five, but only after some discussion with my father, because, after all, no wife of his was going to work. But she did, and life went on. Baby-sitters were the order of the day, especially during the summer months. We lived in a two-bedroom house on a street full of two and three bedroom homes, all built posthaste at the end of the war.

Our town had a Saturday market on Hornton Street, actually on the corner of Manitoba and Horton Streets.

There were no large supermarkets to speak of until the A&P Store (now closed) opened on Talbot Street on what was once the New York Central Park. Then all the other major stores followed.

The town was transformed from sleepy rural to quiet backwater.

The focus of the townspeople’s lives centred around what happened on the railways, the town’s major employer. There were seven different railways as I recall. Who was being bumped on which seniority list or who was or was not on which spare board were all current topics of discussion over coffee or over clotheslines on Mondays.

Monday was always washday. That was just the way things were. The local newspaper (St.Thomas Times Journal) measured big events; ‘who’ was who and ‘how’ they were doing was reported weekly in the Hatched, Matched and Dispatched column on Saturday. You could always find out who was visiting whom and who was away on holiday and where they could afford to go. (It must have been a burglar’s fondest dream!)

I was a loner. I moved between groups or cliques at high school and never felt that I really belonged. I actually prided myself on this ability to float between groups without really belonging.

In my early adult years, I put this learned skill to practical use and entered the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). I was recruited for the Security Service and worked in the semi cloak and dagger world of counter espionage and counter terrorism. I worked primarily in counter espionage during my time in the Security Services.Thus my passion for writing spy novels today.

I really just knew one set of grandparents, my mom’s folks; my dad’s folks had divorced in the 1930’s and had lived apart. My maternal grandfather owned the local watering hole in Dutton Ontario about 50 km away from St Thomas. He had the unwanted (or wanted . . . never could really tell) attention of nearly every ne’er-do-well in the surrounding three counties. As his friend, they had an indirect access to his supply of booze, and this came in especially handy on Sundays and other statutory holidays when the liquor and beer stores were closed or when they were broke (note: the hotel sold 100,000 gallons of beer a month by bottle).

Oh yes, those three counties that bordered onto his were all dry. It was not uncommon to come to the hotel, and later after the hotel changed hands, to the house for a visit on a Sunday and find the Labatt’s courtesy car, the Carling’s courtesy van, the Seagram rep’s vehicle and the town constable’s car parked in the lane. All these visitors would be in the house in some form of intoxication.

I have come to learn that there was a secret to how they could consume so much so often. There was only enough in each bottle for one drink each for those who were present. They only drank quarts of rye (26 oz.). Thus, if there were only two present then only two drinks would be poured and the bottle would be emptied. They had large glasses as I recall, gifts from one of the distillers.

There was not a day that went by when I was in either of my grandparent’s presence that I did not see them consume alcohol. There is sadness and a truth that goes with the thought that alcohol played such a pervasive part of their lives. Another thought, oddly enough, is that I still thought they could walk on water. I loved my grandparents dearly. They were my first experience with god-like creatures, where I truly knew they, especially in my grandfather case, could make the earth part if he so wanted. I knew in my heart of hearts that all I had to do was ask and he would and could make it happen.

It was really as simple as that.

Everything from new bicycles from Peter’s bicycle shop next door to the hotel, to Oh Henry chocolate bars and pop from the dry bar in the hotel ... anytime I wanted them ... it was possible from him.

From this child’s perspective, that was all-powerful. I can remember accompanying him on his rounds, visits to various farms or villages in the area. People sought him out for his blessing and approvals on almost everything that happened at that end of the county.

I learned years later that he was a pushover with cash and damned near everyone owed him and no one was in a position to pay him back. I know that he was also respected because he helped without any thought of payback. He supported various lost members of the family through varied circumstances, who supported others who had been abandoned by life and its crappy circumstances and were still too young or unable to fend for themselves. He was a good man. He drank too much. Oh, by the way, that’s not bad that he drank too much. You may come to understand this.

Now, on my father’s side, his parents had divorced back in the 1930s and that was an oddity in itself. Divorced in the 1930s and Catholic to boot! Actually it was a marriage of the Orange and the Green for those of you who understand Irish history.

My grandfather, Sid, was Welsh (Orange) and lived in St Thomas too. He died of a brain tumor when I was young.

Sid’s ex-wife, my grandmother Sarah (Green and one of 17 siblings, 16 girls and a boy, Uncle Jimmy. We don’t speak much about him, you know) and her daughter, my aunt, lived in Dundas Ontario, several hours drive from our place. I never got to meet them until I was about 10.

Boy, could my Aunt Betty drink. I’d go to school and brag. I mean she could drink, really drink. She really put them under the table. I forget exactly how old I was but we dropped in one time and several members of the Hamilton Tigers Cats were dead drunk in the kitchen and one ... a quarter back I think ... had literally slide under the table.

She quit one weekend cold turkey and she turned her life over to the pursuit of spirituality via religious cause. She became a nun, and a darned good one.

I was proud of her. Grandma Sarah had passed on and that was when my aunt did all this becoming-a-nun stuff, and quitting drinking right after her mother passed on.

I was never really close to my grandmother and I never got to know her as I was only 13 or so when she died. I remember some of the funeral processes and the nuns who came to the funeral home, Order of St Joseph’s I believe, they were standing there in the viewing area like tall statues of black and white. I knew nothing about being Catholic but the old man did and he made a run for it. They came to pray, to pray my newly departed grandmother right into heaven, and I had no idea what that meant or what it would entail.

My dad did and he got the hell out of the room before things got off the ground…but I didn’t know. They must have gone round the rosary 10 times more than normal. I actually had a bruise on my knee caps from kneeling so long but I hung in there.

I got to meet some of the aunts and assorted others from my dad’s side of the family. The only one I remember is Aunt Gurt, and she was a sight. She was at the funeral. She lived in Dundas too.

Aunt Gurt had a knack for wearing make-up in such a fashion that her age of 70 plus was perfectly disguised by her outward appearance of a not-so-nearly-retired-madam. My dad was a little more direct in his description of her.

At the funeral I got to hear some of the stories that had threads leading directly back to County Cork in Ireland, that wove their way through ‘establishment’ families of today’s Upper Canada (Ontario). E.P. Taylor was in there someplace with the Perkins ... Freddy ... family and the stories went on and on.

People showed up at the funeral, and those who were ‘someone’and they wore their finery, mink stoles, etc. just to be seen, even though the weather was hot. Family names of establishment Upper Canada were well represented.

In all honesty, they were people who had had hard beginnings and fought their way out of their assigned lot in life. And they all drank too much. Some varied the theme with worked too much, and that was praised because then they could consume too much. Others were just a little weird (remember Uncle Jimmy, the one we don’t talk about) and we didn’t talk about them because they were never ‘right’ in the first place.

I believe now that the appropriate way to describe my life is to say that, if one never ventured past the surface then one might conclude that all was normal. No big deal. (I became skilled at living a lie.) The key word here is "apparent", because something was there and it turned into the thing that lurked in my life until I was well into my 30s. I never really knew what it was, but I knew something was there. I knew for a fact that it was having a major impact on my life. I could not control it. It was just happening to me.

I had read someplace that, if you have something you want to learn, then you should teach it. I had lots to do and believe me much more to learn, especially about myself, so I said to myself “Self, time to go teach.” My sojourn had passed with the RCMPolice and who would want to hire a newly retired spy-catcher?

That’s when I bumped into George Bullied and Twin Valleys School. Twin Valleys School [a.k.a. TVS or The Valley] ... it was in Neil Andersons' living room on a spring Saturday afternoon in Ottawa Ontario as I recall. I had just quit the RCMPolice ... and literally had nothing to do ... so I was available ... and the journey was about to begin ...

The Valley was an alternative to the penal system for young offenders. George said something to the effect that, if you’re not doing anything, and I wasn’t, then come to The Valley. So I did. That got me to Wardsville, Ontario in May of 1979. The roller coaster had started for me officially several years prior in 1976 when my wife died, but I think it was in 1979 when I first surfaced for the first time.

Life is something you dive into blindly. Sometimes, when you do dive in ... which is the only requirement life demands for anyone ... it is so thick and so cold and distasteful ... deep too, it seemed to take forever to surface again. The time frame from 1976 to 1979 was the longest period I had ever had to hold my breath, my first serious dive in to life 101 ... both spiritually and psychologically. Joanne (wife) had died ... Joanne is the mother of my eldest son Warren. That space in time was an eternity for me.

I thought I had found safety upon arriving at The Valley. Life had been death defying for me and i was in shell shock. For a short period of time I thought my life was a safe because of where I was ... at or in The Valley ... but then I discovered that these people were just like me and some were in fact more lost than I. Frying pans ... Fires ... all the metaphors were there and my life was just as confusing as it always was ... but what I had discovered was that I was in a place where I could both heal and learn ...

Now, the tale of ‘who’ I am and how I got to be here gets just a little twisted here. Pick up the thread of my story where, in the spring of 1979, I was realizing that all the supposed ‘niceness’ of life, wasn’t. I was living a lie and had become well practiced at it. Then I can jumpstart back again to early winter 1970 where I had a job with the Federal Government in the RCMPolice Security Services. I was working my way up and received early promotions. Previously, before my transfer into the Security Service, I had met and married a young lady from Regina, Joanne ... while in training actually ... and we had a child together. She had a very particular set of problems ... actually they mirrored mine I just never realized it at the time. Then I began to notice that she drank far too much, but I never really put it together that this observation may have applied to me also. Odd, isn’t it, what we can see in others and can’t see in ourselves?

That observation took several years for me to see, and a decade or so to be understood and then accepted. Noticing and understanding came after an incident that could only be described as ‘something that should never happen to your worst enemy’. The front door to Hell kicked open and out came the unholy horse guard and all the crap and misery they could muster.

Joanne's upbringing did not seem at all like mine. She had a drunken stepfather and an absentee mom who worked to support everyone, including the damnedest mixture of ne’er-do-wells you could imagine. Remember the ne’er-do-wells at my grandfather’s place? Well I didn’t really remember them and, more importantly, I didn’t then understand the significance of them either. The odd thing was that I fit right in with this new group and felt totally and completely at home. I didn’t actually like it, but it fit like a glove. That whole experience eventually led to what I was to think, for the longest time, was the true trauma of my life. It was a travesty, and it was dramatic and I would not wish it on anyone. The trauma was in the smoke and mirrors that came with the drama, and, as I was to discover much later, the trauma had been waiting for me all along. I had just never noticed or knew that I could notice.

My wife eventually committed suicide and left me a widower with a small child. I was devastated. Could this really be happening to me? Where do I look now and what do I look for?

What I discovered was I was spending most of my time with the ‘whys’ of life. It took me a long time to come to terms with asking ‘what’ rather than ‘why’.

This brings me back to arriving at Twin Valleys School (The Valley) in 1979 and the beginnings of my search for me. I knew I needed to do something, but I was not sure what that was. What I came to quickly learn at The Valley was that they didn’t know either, but almost everyone was at least honest enough to admit to their ‘lostness’. (Nice to be lost together!)

Our community drew members from other communities and us to them. There was a network of lost people being lost together, which, for awhile during the 70’s, was what I called the last bastion of ‘hippy-dippy-dom’.

As I searched for me, I stumbled across a few things. It was actually only the same thing; I just kept bumping into it from different perspectives and angles ... thinking it was separate. Like walking in circles. Here is an example of how this works:

In the mid 1990's I went to Paris for a very short holiday…actually for lunch. I had free tickets anywhere a particular airline went, and I was relatively broke, so the longer in the air the better. Free food and no accommodations to be paid for at 35,000 feet! Paris is relatively empty in August, since the French are all on holiday, and rates are cheap, so I headed out on a Wednesday evening and arrived back home the following Tuesday morning. On Saturday evening, I had the infamous lunch. I went by taxi to a delightful little place that is reputed to be the oldest restaurant on the continent. My dinner partner got to sit at Victor Hugo’s favorite place. (The fellow at the next table remarked that the food was terrible and the place had run on its reputation for over 300 years. He spoke the truth!) After this meal, I decided to walk back to the hotel on St. Germaine, just up the ‘rue’ from the Bon Marché. This seemed to be a rather straightforward thing to do. I remember walking past L’Oden, a street corner near St. Germaine’s cathedral church. There is a movie theatre on this corner and the marquee caught my eye. I walked and walked for what seemed to be an appropriate length of time in what seemed to be a relatively straight direction, only to find myself approaching L’Oden from the same direction as I had when I left the restaurant. The marquee again caught my eye. I then got very ‘creative’ with this and managed to do it several times…only in slower and slower succession.

Finally, I did the unthinkable and asked directions. Imagine that! Hell, I’m the guy who knows ALL. What a request! I didn’t think I could do it! But I had to, so I did.

Now as I re read this ... I discovered that there are literally hundreds of stories that are missing but only for the moment ... as I wrote the magic happened more memories and stories are jumping around now at the surface of my mind wanting to get their time on this document ... Smile

A Window into Me

This is my window into me ...

I come here to look past the present and into see me. To see the things I think I see. It is here that I can look into my past ... It is from here that I can look into my future ... and most importantly I can look into my dreams ...

This window into me is a facinating thing to have ...

I suspect everyone has one but they just have no idea where to look or what to do with it when they find it ...

I discovered this place from a dream.

So I can just sit here and reflect ... I can reflect on reflections ... this window somedays seems to want to defy me somedays and stay closed but I have found that if I just leave go of my ego's desires then it always opens and I can see ...

I write novels now as a pass time ... I have no idea where they are going to go until I sit down to write ... then it takes a few moments and if I just relax and get past the need to know and begin to softly stroke the keys ... the story comes ... It is like going to the movies ... I learned that from Michael Enright (CBC) when he interviewed JK Rowlings ... she was struggling with resolving what several of her characters were going to do next in Harry Potter and then I heard her reveal that she was hearing the story (sometimes) for the first time when she sat down at the keyboard to write ... I tried it and over that Xmas break I wrote 158 pages of the First Novel. It was raw but it got me passed page 3 ... which was something I could never do before ... I mean the story would just fold in on itself and quit ... once I realized I was going to the movies ... so to speak and I did not have plan what was going to happen before I sat down ... out it came ... 

It is now complete ... and in final editing ... 989 pages ... space and a half  ...  Font 12 ... 257,000 words and a whale of a story. When proper spaced it should break down to 600 or so pages single spaced and a reduced font size and page size ...

So as I sit here and type this I can feel the window opening and I can feel the story coming on ...

Just so you know, I have started the second book and am 147 pages into it ... another spy vs spy novel ... It picks up where the other left off and things continued ... as they did back in those days ...

Maybe I will discuss them here as I do this blog thing ...

There are a lot of fond memories as I reflect on this ...

I'm going to move to a different place and begin to tell my story ...