Alien Corn

By Alex Aitken

The story is based on the author`s move from Scotland to Canada in 1978 with his family. It is a tale of trials and tribulations, successes and failures in the New World.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alex Aitken
• Release date: Dec 11, 2011
• ISBN: 9780968409435

Alex Aitken

Canadian by nationality, Scottish by the grace of God. A retired lawyer, an emigrant, a family man, a dreamer of dreams and a writer of stories, long, short and tall.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Leaving Scotland

After my mother died, the day after she died in fact, I decided to emigrate from Scotland. I hadn’t decided where to go or exactly when I would go, nor had I decided to tell my wife and our four children. All this would come later. For the moment I was happy just to keep the secret of it to myself, and wallow in the pleasure of it without interference from family or friends. And I never shed a tear over it from that day on, not until I stood on the deck of the Stefan Batory watching the darkness fall on the coast of Cornwall and the tiny shore lights fade away behind us.

A white-coated steward approached.

Mr. Douglas…Mr. Douglas. Radio telegram, sir.

I took the envelope, wondering who might have sent it. All the farewells were made in person on our last night in Scotland, prior to taking the train to London. It must be a mistake. I went to recall the steward but he had already departed below decks. I opened the envelope. A one line message appeared in heavy teleprinter type.

Just a short hiatus. Step boldly across.

No name, but I knew who had sent it, and then, after all these months of waiting to leave, and all the handshakes and farewells and good lucks, and last drams at the Myrestane Inn, the tears came.

Charlie had sent it.

Charlie Blair, my old hill-walking pal. It was a quotation from Scottish Peaks by W.A.Poucher.

I recalled the day I first read it. Charlie and I were standing in Scotch mist one step from the summit of Sgurr Nan Gillean in Skye, and Poucher urged that last step across the short gap where the chasm below was shrouded in mist. The last step to the top.

I wiped the tears from my eyes as I recalled that day on the mountain and the squelching retreat to the hotel and the village hop thereafter. Charlie cast off the climbing boots and anorak, produced the polished Oxfords from his waterproof grip, showered and changed and emerged smelling like Oscar de la Renta – hair greased down and goatee neatly clipped – ready to meet the ladies, such as they were, in Portree Community Hall. What a Cassanova Charlie would have made.

Step boldly across! This was one time I would step across without Charlie as the Stefan Batory ploughed westward across the Atlantic heading for the port of Montreal.

* * *

I came to write this memoir at the age of seventy-one, and this is where the story began – thirty-one years earlier on the deck of that ship, leaving the ould sod for the New World.

Somebody asked me once, What was it like emigrating to Canada with a wife and four children?

Well, I’ll tell you.

Chapter 2

Peenawak, Manitoba

Why do you want to leave Scotland?

Charlie asked me that in the summer of 1978, and it was the question many others would ask me years later, on the flat and endless Canadian prairie.

Ann knew the answer.

When anyone asked her why the family emigrated to Canada, her answer was always the same – and still is.

Ian had itchy feet, she would reply. And she came because he came, or at least that’s what she told them.

So why "itchy feet’?

I think it all began with the dreams of a young boy, sitting in the pitch darkness of Myrestane’s little cinema - what they used to call the pictures in these days - smelling the antiseptic that they sprayed on the seats and watching the celluloid youngsters of his own age romp happily through the streets and yards of North America’s small towns.

Everyone was friendly, leaning over garden fences and serving at soda fountains. It never rained, and there were no smoking chimneys or clanking engines from the Work (Myrestane’s oil works) , or cold, damp winds. Nobody was poor, or angry, dirty or threatening. There were no drunks, no bad men, and people were always smiling.

That’s where he would go when he grew up.

Then on Saturday matinees, Hopalong Cassidy galloped across the plains, and Roy Rogers’ Mclean-white smile seemed to welcome him to the Big Country.

A boy came from America once. He was my age – about eleven – and they said he was a movie star. His grandfather had emigrated to America from Myrestane years before.

His name was Gregory Marshall.

The local cinema manager arranged a reception on the stage one Saturday afternoon for all our school classes to see Gregory and his proud parents. Then they showed a movie featuring Gregory.

Later, when Gregory came to play with the local children, I was one of the ones who pushed him into the burn, and he ran off crying to his parents.

He wasn’t a real movie star. Couldn’t have been.

When they tore down that cinema in the sixties, they pulled all the seats outside into the parking lot, even the big double seats – the dive-ins that were for courting couples – and people swore they saw the fleas jumping off them on to the tarmac, but I think that was just a story.

They cleaned the site and it was as if there had never been a cinema there, but they couldn’t get rid of the dreams of generations of moviegoers. They were still there, just below the surface.

It wasn’t that life was unhappy in the seventies. Ann had her friends, young mothers with children and older matrons around the village whom she had known all her life.

I was a solicitor in an office where there was a laugh a minute. I think I attracted the strangest kind of company to work in the office.

Alfred Coulter, our criminal law assistant, went slightly nuts one day and had to be let go when he started signing letters to our clients:

I’ll give you a part in my next movie,

Robert Redford.

Then there was Norman Blake, an apprentice solicitor working his way up the hard way, the youngest and smartest apprentice on his course although some said he was affected by the full moon.

Periodically, monthly, some said, he would do strange things, like drive into the local hospital compound, tear up all the flower gardens with his car, and seek admission to the young nurses’ home in the middle of the night, promising eternal devotion to whatever student nurse would open the door.

One night, when turned away from the local hostelry by the barman who thought he had had enough, he went home and returned with a pistol from his gun collection and persuaded the now quivering barman to get pouring. He almost landed in jail that time.

And there was William Radford, Real Estate Agent and Insurance Broker, who had an office next door. We referred clients back and forth. Big Will, as they called him, was the biggest most successful business man in Myrestane.

He was the one who went on vacations to Mallorca and Spain long before these became common-place destinations, and the one who insisted on buying all the wine for everyone’s table at Rotary Club functions. Success glistened in his greased-back hair and from his bright silk ties, and I liked him even though, as the saying goes, thousands didn’t.

He drove a big Jaguar, the 4.2 litre, the one with the twin petrol tanks and the pull–out cocktail table in the back. I liked him for the same reason I liked my Robert Redford assistant and my lunatic apprentice. They were different. They were exciting. They helped me to anticipate the working week, bobbing up like orange life rafts in an otherwise drab grey seascape.

When the apprentice qualified, visited one nurse too many and lost his wife and children in a nasty divorce, I still liked him. He dodged me when I tried to contact him years later. And when Big Will went to jail for embezzlement, left Myrestane and was never heard of thereabouts again, I still remembered him fondly.

It was the excitement, I suppose. It could come from people, from places or from change. Change, like going to the Big Country.

I think that’s where I got the itchy feet.

* * *

When I thought about it, and I tried not to think about it, the question was easy enough to answer.

I could have said that the seventies in Britain brought strikes, power cuts and the prospect of Margaret Thatcher.

I could have said that I left to better myself, but that wasn’t really true. I was a solicitor – like it or not I had risen from being a miner’s son to wearing one of the surest badges of the middle class – and there was no better house in the prairies than the one I left in Myrestane. Moving from Myrestane to a clapboard residence in a small prairie town was not an upward move house-wise.

I could have said that my widowed mother had recently died, my wife had no parents living, and that I suddenly felt the greatest surge of freedom to go somewhere – anywhere – and seek adventure. There was some truth in this.

And yet there was another possible reason for leaving the good life in Britain.

I was a victim of the British class system, a miner’s son who went to university at a time when the doors of advanced learning had not long been opened to the working class. Later I became a member of a profession whose ranks were full of merchant school products whose parents had paid good money for their offspring’s education and standing in life. Against this background, my telling accent didn’t go unnoticed at Law Society dinners. At first it mattered little, but later, when I became the stuff of humorous anecdotes that brought a smile to the faces of the in-crowd, it began to annoy me.

One such story going around revealed my attitude to the established conventions.

Feu duty – a relic of the distant past – was an annual fee paid by a home owner to his feu superior. In the mid-seventies these annual feu duties were being redeemed by owners, who were selling their homes, paying a fixed sum to the feu superior. The procedure was that the seller’s solicitor would formally offer the home to the feu superior – through his solicitor – and the feu superior would formally waive the offer and accept the cash to redeem the feu duty. The feu superior in the Myrestane region where I practised law was Lord Haveitall whose solicitors were the prestigious Edinburgh firm of Messrs. Smugness and Sneers of Parliament Gardens.

When Albert Huggins, retired shale miner, sold his little terraced cottage to move into an old folk’s home, my office junior, a scatter brained lass called Linda Bell, omitted to make the formal offer to sell it to Lord Haveitall. A snooty assistant solicitor at Messrs. Smugness and Sneers was reducing Linda to tears on the telephone over this omission when I returned from my two-pint lunch.

The story went-and I well remember it- that I snatched the phone from the sobbing girl and asked the legal bully on the other end the question: "Do you seriously think that Lord Haveitall, 13th Earl of Bigfields, Marquis of Splendid Acres, Custodian of the Wooden Wardrobe, really wants to buy a fucking two-roomed, converted miner’s row house overlooking Myrestane canal from Albert fucking Huggins? I was angry. The staff could tell.

The trouble was that the after dinner story, though funny enough, was not what they laughed at. They laughed at me. I was shown up as not one of the club, and the Smugnesses and Sneerses laughed hardest of all.

Hence another reason for going – to find a place where there was no such class system, no such stupid procedures involving vassals and landed gentry and the like. Whenever I thought back to that day many years earlier when my uncle Jack, whom I idolized, held open a gate for the Linlithgow and Stirlingshire Hunt so that one of them could throw him a half crown, I was ashamed. I vowed then that I would never let any one of them or their flunkeys patronise me or mine. That’s why I was angry.

My decision to go was selfish. I didn’t move for the sake of my wife. She didn’t like change, at least, not on this scale. She enjoyed her life the way it was, feeling no discontent. Nor did I move to benefit my four children. The younger three, Eleanor, Jack and Mary, at eleven, ten and seven, were young enough to go, but the oldest, Tosh, named after his grandfather Tosh Douglas, was almost thirteen and what lay ahead would be difficult for him. I didn’t know it at the beginning, but most children who are in their teens don’t settle well in new countries and frequently return to their original home when they come of age. Tosh Douglas was almost too old to be uprooted.

But even if I had known that, it is doubtful if it would have made a difference to my decision.

These were the reasons I gave for why I went. The main reason was that, while I worked in a good practice in Scotland, it wasn’t my practice. It belonged to a senior partner who hired everyone else to do the work, calling them junior partners when, in reality, they were what’s called in Manitoba, hired men, and he kept the lion’s share of the profits. I wanted my own practice, where I would keep the lion’s share, and as far away from him as I could get.

Now, with no parents and no one to hold me back, I had my chance.

Where I went posed an easier question.

Initially, Australia was attractive until a friend of mine said it was too hairy-legged. He said it was a country for teenagers on beaches. So when a job offer cropped up in Manitoba, I didn’t hesitate. Little did I realise then that emigrating to Canada to live in rural Manitoba was something like emigrating to Britain to settle on the coast of Sutherland.

In any event, the Douglas family left from Tilbury dock on a Polish ship called the Stefan Batory and arrived in Montreal eight days later.

* * *

A year later, after we had lived in the city where I underwent a course for admission to the Canadian Bar in the company of a bunch of fresh-faced kids from the University of Manitoba Law School, we moved to the country.

Canadians have this thing about immigrants re-qualifying in Canada, which is why one finds foreign professionals, doctors, dentists, engineers and others, driving taxis to make a living. I once met a professor of music from the University of Odessa playing a violin in a Winnipeg restaurant to entertain the diners.

Anyway, after the Bar course and the appropriate articles, the Douglas family arrived in a town of around three thousand souls in the midst of sixty million acres of wheat land at the end of a hot Manitoba summer.

We had spent all the money from the sale of our house in moving to Canada, shipping a lot of useless furniture on very poor advice, renting a city apartment for a year and setting up a law office on Peenawak’s only main street.

On the first day that the office doors were opened, in walked Jeanie Crabtree.

She came in around three in the afternoon, a big woman in her sixties – solid but not fat – with a big round weather-beaten face and hands like a man. She took a seat across the desk from me and the big face broke into a smile, chasing away the initial aspect of an imminent storm.

She spoke in a surprisingly quiet voice. She told me that her maiden name, her own name as she put it, was McAllister, that her grandfather had come from Scotland and worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company in Norway House at the top of Lake Winnipeg, that she had married Sidney Crabtree, an Englishman, and farmed outside of town for forty years. She had never been to Scotland, but she remembered her grandfather and some of the words he used. She asked me how I liked Manitoba. She was a good talker and an even better listener, and we talked back and forward for over an hour until it dawned on me to ask how I might help her.

Oh, she said, with a little smile, "there’s nothing that you can do for me right now. I just called in to hear you talk. I love your Scottish accent.

This was the accent that I had learned in the mining village of my childhood. It was the accent that made my Edinburgh legal colleagues wince. And I was to discover that it was the accent that was beloved all over this new country though I never discovered why.

I remembered my mother saying that I would always find my way so long as I had a guid Scotch tongue in my heid. How right she was!

My ideas of Canada had come largely from geography lessons in school and cub-scout songs around the campfires of my boyhood.

Land of the silver birch, home of the beaver.

Where still the mighty moose wanders at will…

It was a land of mountains and forests, rugged tree-lined shores and azure skies, flat prairies with combine harvesters trundling in great long lines through miles of yellow wheat. All that was ingrained on my schoolboy memory.

One thing, however, was missing from that picture – Indians.

Lawyer or no, educated or no, I knew next to nothing about North America’s First Nations people. That was soon to change, for I was to be Legal Aid counsel every Friday in the weekly makeshift courtroom in the Legion Hall and most of my Friday morning clients