Enders: Growing up in the West End of Vancouver in the 1940S.

By Colin Ruthven

Colin Ruthven grew up in Vancouver’s lively West End in the years during and following World War II.

He shares stories that are humorously light and others that are stirringly dark, including what it was like growing up with a father who spent the war battling his own demons. His Aunt Helen, who served as a dietician in the Royal Canadian Army, would tell him how she nursed concentration camp survivors back to health after liberation.

The author deftly ties in stories highlighting his boyhood comradery with fellow “enders” with more serious moments from adolescence, leading up to his dramatic departure from Canada at age nineteen.

Ruthven, a dual citizen of Canada and the United States of America, would go on to spend several decades in America, serving as a Marine fighter pilot in the Vietnam War and retiring as a lieutenant colonel before enjoying a second career as an award-winning illustrator.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Dec 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781480897595

Colin Ruthven

Colin Ruthven was born in Sweetgrass, Montana, but grew up in Canada with dual citizenship. He left Canada in 1954 and served in the United States Marine Corps, becoming a fighter pilot and serving two tours in Vietnam. He retired as a lieutenant colonel after twenty-one years and enjoyed a second career as an illustrator with The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tennessee. He lives in Memphis with his wife, Alice, where he writes and paints.

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Copyright © 2021 Colin Ruthven.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means,

graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by

any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author

except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This story is autobiographical. Some names and identifying details have been changed to

protect the privacy of individuals. I have occasionally taken fictional license, combining

characteristics of one personality with another. And, when an adult was not in the room,

allowed an unbridled imagination to have its way with characters, events and situations.

www.colinruthven.com

Archway Publishing

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Bloomington, IN 47403

www.archwaypublishing.com

844-669-3957

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in

this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views

expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the

views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Cover Photo by Fonsie Photos

Vancouver, Canada

Back Photo by Fran Doggerel

Memphis, Tennessee

ISBN: 978-1-4808-9758-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-9757-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-9759-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020919968

Archway Publishing rev. date: 12/04/2020

This book is

dedicated to Alice Goodman Ruthven without whom

this book could not have been written nor would have been written.

I am beyond grateful to my wife, Alice Goodman Ruthven,

editor, partner and friend, who taught me that you can’t

just randomly use a colon instead of a comma.

CONTENTS

1 Beginnings

2 Birth

3 Derailments

4 Trains

5 Lethbridge

6 Calgary

7 Pinocchio

8 Transitions

9 Vancouver

10 Settling In

11 Feelings

12 School

13 Discipline

14 The West End

15 Holly Lodge

16 Zoe

17 The Nuisance Alliance

18 Low Drama

19 The Elevator

20 The Basement

21 Beverly DeVries

22 The Japanese Hanky

23 Early Employment

24 Mister Gore

25 Archie

26 The Metamorphosis

27 A Relative Truth

28 A Son’s Regret

29 English Bay

30 Regina

31 Heroes

32 The Happy Lie

33 Fathers and Sons

34 Mayfair Avenue

35 The Ring

36 Cliff Dwellers

37 The Strange Man

38 Flying Coal Sacks

39 Ten Cents a Glass

40 Early Enterprise

41 Ye Olde Weeding Hole

42 Sylvia Sinclair

43 Reliable Drug Store

44 George Wilson

45 Disarmed

46 Drake Bauer

47 Sandy Beechum

48 The Grift

49 The Studio

50 Trevor McGregor

51 Falling Into Love

52 Erica Dean

53 Blaine Forest

54 Sooke

55 Holberg

56 The Saint

57 Audrey McPhelan

58 Dancing and Dressing

59 The Trombone

60 Leaving the Nest

61 Melville Street

62 The Announcement

63 The Attic Room

64 The Un Cracked Cup

65 Clarity

66 Gill Netter Red

67 Rory Heffernan

68 A Close Call

69 The Austin

70 Departure

71 A Full Sea

72 Through the Looking Glass

73 Working the Room

74 Enders

Surprisingly detailed, bitter-sweet memories of growing up in Vancouver during the 1940’s

After reading this book, I’m convinced the writer has a long-term eidetic memory. The detail he gives of his growing years is amazing, and after reading his memories it made me think back on my own early years. In doing so I recalled things from my past that I might never had dredged up had he not offered us a look at his. I highly recommend this book for this reason alone. He writing style elegantly weaves together humor, sadness, hope, fear and regret. To me, each chapter is a mini-story. Chapter 24, Mister Gore, will tear a hole in your heart, while Chapter 59, The Trombone (my favorite), is hilarious while at the same time tragic. After I read it, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry (I laughed, a lot). It’s a great read and I’m glad I bought it.

Russ Tilton

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Intense and hilarious

I enjoyed this book immensely and was sucked in on page one. Gifted with an incredible memory, Colin Ruthven has woven a story that fascinated me from start to finish. He shared his most intimate personal revelations with deeply developed insights, in prose that was densely written with no wasted words, with wonderfully memorable characters. I was alternately suffering and laughing out loud. I’m eagerly waiting for part two.

Doctor Ralph Goodman

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Laughter and angst combine to make this book a riveting read.

What a treat to read a book combining real belly laughs with an honest, tough look at growing up with both grim realities and loving kindness. The unsparing view of family life here brings an authenticity to this memoir frequently absent in this genre. I found myself wanting to follow the protagonist into the rest of his life to see what happened and how he handled it. Highly recommended.

Karen McCarthy

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Memorable

This is the best coming-of-age book I’ve ever read, maybe the best book period! Each chapter provided another charm, another lesson, another laugh, cringe, or insight. Colin Ruthven may truly be the most interesting man in the world. I felt much less alone as I read about a life that the writer was able to recall in such masterly detail...from smells, to feelings, to sights; and in a reminiscent manner that feels like he just experienced it yesterday (think Thomas Wolfe without the depressive side-effects). It’s entertainingly funny, wise, and psychologically healing; a totally open and honest book about a man, his mistakes, foibles, insecurities, and lessons learned. Do yourself a favor - just start reading it. You won’t stop!

Danny Burke

1

BEGINNINGS

E VERYTHING heroic had been done. The predecessors of our generation had fought two wars and survived a Great Depression before the century had half lapsed. There was little left for the rest of us to achieve. Brave deeds had been exhausted. We were the progeny of valor. A laughable attempt to emulate our forefathers would have receded into obscurity. The era in which we were living was a time called after. It was left for the children of those who had survived great events to pretend.

I, for one, grew up pretending. I lived in a private world of wonder and fantasy. My contemporaries have their own stories. Some of them might have become heroes; maybe they felt realized. I did not. I’ve doubted ever I could, for the stamp of incompetence I’ve felt in the face of the achievements of the previous generations. I tried to find my own heroics, but few men can who still measure their achievements by those who have preceded them.

If you were an adult in the Forties, you were probably a hero. If you were one of their children, you would suffer an obscurity born of respect. It would fail the veterans of World Wars One and Two, wounded by the added insult of the Great Depression, to live better than they had. Some still carried the weight of foreign metal in their bodies, others a sense of poverty that would be conveyed unto future generations. The message implicit from the human remnant of this time was that it was a betrayal to even have a good life. At least this is how I read it. I was not troubled by such a mandate. I had neither the energy, nor the imagination for greatness. I was relieved to measure my march by its own slow pace.

My father didn’t go to war. A reserve sergeant in the Seaforth Highlanders during The Second World War, he polished his boots and brass, donned a heavy woolen uniform one evening a week then marched, a parade of one, across Vancouver’s Burrard Street Bridge to the Seaforth Armory, all of this to a cadence of private fears scarcely masked to the rest of the family who would forever wonder at, but never thoroughly enter, his world.

Our family came to Vancouver from the Canadian Prairies in the late summer of 1940. Working for the Canadian Pacific Railway while Canada was engaged in The War, my father was classified an employee in an essential occupation and thus deferred from military service. Frigid and infested trenches would have been a happier alternative to the conflicts he’d have with his own demons. I’m not sure he conquered these dragons, rather he nurtured them to term, a legacy that he might one day bequeath to his only son.

Aunt Helen, my father’s only sibling, a year younger than he, was the only member of the family who saw combat. She was a lieutenant in the Royal Canadian Army, a dietician. She spoke little about her contributions to the war, but did reveal that she helped to liberate some of the concentration camps in Europe. She looked into the eyes of starving torment and taught dead people how to eat. More to the point, she taught these suffering souls how to not eat, lest they kill themselves with a glut of too much food into their starving bodies. The women in my family were the heroes. Most of the men marked time until those who did the fighting came home. My mother, my aunts and my sister were the collective fortress of gumption from whom the men drew strength and comfort.

I was an especially immature twelve years old in 1946 when Aunt Helen had returned from overseas to restore an interrupted life. She had changed. She was thin and depressed. Her sadness expressed itself most vividly one afternoon shortly after she had come home. Three of us: Aunt Helen, my mother and I were in the basement of my paternal grandparent’s home in the Kerrisdale district of Vancouver. She had barely unpacked a trunk full of uniforms and assorted plunder before I was rummaging through it all.

Buried deep in a large steamer trunk full of souvenirs and booty from a liberated Europe, I discovered compelling treasures that were a pure fiction to a boy who had romanced the war half a world away. The contents of the chest could have held the contraband from a vanquished enemy. I fondled a leather belt bearing the name of a German soldier, moved that the very man who had burned his name into the leather was very probably dead. There were aromatic packets of foreign cigarettes, liqueurs and French laces, a miniature Nazi bayonet letter opener and from beneath a bolt of Scottish tweed, a green woolen tunic worn by an SS officer who had bet on a purpose and lost. I was hypnotically engrossed in the spoils. However, I could not help being drawn to a conversation that was taking place behind me between my mother and my aunt. A heavy energy had suddenly filled the room, forbidding anything other than the women’s words.

Their dialogue was hushed, but intense. I gradually withdrew my attention from the contents of the trunk with its rich smell of Turkish tobacco and musty taste of foreign dust; the chest could have held the ancient mysteries of Pharaohs or Fathers of the Desert for their relevance to my youthful reality. How could I even begin to appreciate the stuff of such history? The physical presence of my aunt and my mother were more relevant to my world and so my focus shifted to the two women. I broke off my vicarious journey into my Aunt Helen’s history and began to instead to be drawn to the energy that was principally charging the basement space.

The atmosphere and their words were saturated with sadness. Their faces were very close together, almost touching. Suddenly they fell into one another’s arms. My aunt collapsed, exorcising with heavy sobs an anguish that lasted for the longest minutes. I’d never seen her cry before, nor have I since. So uncharacteristic was this of the woman that I scampered up the stairs into my grandmother’s kitchen, frightened somehow by the taboo sanctity of the scene so entirely alien to my orientation. I felt like I had chanced upon something unclothed, sacred yet obscene. I wondered if the women would ever survive the grief that ravaged the basement that afternoon. I retreated into a window seat and waited, lost in the aroma of fresh, oven made bread and butter, the signature scent of my grandmother’s kitchen.

With that particular property of strong women, my aunt and my mother soon ascended from the basement and glided apparently unscathed into the kitchen. They had left the remnants of that huge sadness in the basement and appeared in the upper part of the house as if nothing had happened. I’ve since witnessed this with some women when, after a crippling blow or a wrenching grief that would have indelibly altered my life, one finds them a short time later engrossed in a lesser detail like a broken nail or a complicated casserole, giving it their full, but nonchalant attention.

Maybe if I’d been a part of their conversation, I too might have recovered from the episode. However, women are a closed unit, a gang unto themselves, particularly configured to address feelings with those distinct faculties foreign to men. Women engage at an intimate level that can penetrate the layer of veneer behind which some men are more comfortable. There are emotions with which women naturally address their lives which the opposite sex often buries until something bends, often breaks.

Once they had joined my grandmother in her kitchen, my aunt and my mother gave themselves busily to the general domestic scheme. They’d risen from their own private hell to the realm of the functionally alive. In the presence of these three, I felt like the one left at home while the warriors had gone to war. I’ve never forgotten that scene in the basement. I was insufficient to the moment. Most of me couldn’t acquire what had happened and, I believe, some of me is still waiting to be filled in on that particular event, specifically, and on what goes on between women in general. No man will ever really know this thing.

When my mother supposed that I was old enough to understand, she told me some of my Aunt Helen’s story. My father and his sister were born in Ontario, Canada in 1908 and 1909 respectively, the children of railway pioneer, William Hugh Ruthven, who eventually would become the Superintendent of the Canadian Pacific Railway for the Western Division. I’ve gone through the pages of my father’s impeccably maintained scrap books and wondered at the difference in the two siblings, as I knew them as adults, compared to when they were younger, sporting bell-bottomed trousers, raccoon coats and flapper dresses with thin shoulder straps and flashing smiles. They were intoxicated with optimism of a time that presumed there would be no other like it, that it would last forever. The two appear crafted straight from the pen of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Helen Zoe Ruthven was not an attractive woman. Her narrow features could be tolerated on the face of a man as handsome as my father, whom she unfortunately resembled. Her teeth might have fit my father’s bite, but not her own small jaw. She had a face whose mouth might never have been closed for the formidable smile and the teeth it displayed. She had learned in childhood how to survive this handicap: if she was going to have a big smile, then she would jolly well have a good one, and she did. For her entire life, her weight never varied from the exact meat required to fit her spare frame. She was the pure expression of economy at every level: physically, mentally and spiritually. She was beyond us all in durability and industry. She was to us the spine of the tribe. The rest of us were flesh that hung from her foundation.

From the beginning, I was the favorite, actually her only nephew. She never married. Unless accompanied by one of her many female Army friends, Aunt Helen just about always traveled solo. Like many Canadians who had served in the European theater, she had a British reserve, carrying, it would seem, some secret beneath a pleated tweed skirt. Her speech was Canadian correct, corrupted by a slight British imprint.

Throughout our relationship, whenever I visited her home, the ambiance never varied: an understated sophistication, not ostentatious, almost austere. She had exquisite taste and a beautifully ordered mind. Her home, always an upscale apartment, was invariably well appointed, exhibiting a margin of contemporary show just this side of exceeding her means. An innate frugality allowed her a surplus should something come along to please her tastes or there arose the need to help someone else. Her thoughts were usually more to the latter than the former.

When something untoward occurred in the family, a crisis or event requiring an adult presence, she would be the one to take charge. When it came time to install her parents in a nursing home, dealing with their finances and eventually their demise, Aunt Helen was the one who met these responsibilities. Her brother waited on the periphery, not for what he could contribute, but for what he might realize.

Aunt Helen kept a tidy, but busy desk, the orderly nucleus around which her world was managed. On its surface, there might be three photographs, but always there was one particular picture. I’m probably three or four, in short pants sitting on a tricycle, the front wheel aggressively turned, indicating purpose and an impudent impatience. I’m about to veer audaciously out of the frame. My nostrils are flared as if I have been captured for only the barest moment in my busy day to be photographed. I’m taking a deep breath. I’ll pedal into my day the instant the picture is taken.

My apparent optimism suggests that the photographer, doubtless my Aunt Helen, would certainly be there when I got back. My assumptions in those first six years were that the world was mine and everyone in it would always be there. Aunt Helen might disappear for years at a time, but I have, for my lifetime until she died, known that she would be there, not only in an emotional, but also in a very pragmatic way. She was a holding place. If she gave me nothing else, she left me with the hope that I might one day find her properties in myself. I’m not sure what it is, but I sense that I carry today something that my Aunt Helen conveyed to me, solely by my being in her presence. But she was to give me so much more. She was to play a very large part in my entire life.

As she infused in me some indefinable property, she also served milk and biscuits when I was too young to imagine there might be something else more abstract that she was imparting. As the years passed, she served tea, then coffee. Eventually it was good Canadian Blend Whiskey. We drank together and we would eventually abstain together. Through all of this, she taught me that if you do not possess dignity, you might borrow it for a time, and if you can sit long enough with someone who has it and take the seed of this into your own life, you yourself might eventually acquire it as your own.

Often when I’m alone I return to a place where a part of me is sitting with Aunt Helen, enjoying an economic exchange of words, sometimes silence. I look across a coffee table at a painting that has arrested me for hours. At some point in my long relationship so engaged with my Aunt Helen and the many paintings on her wall, I acquired the ability to be alone and further, the capacity to love art.

Not long after the historic photograph of the boy on the tricycle had been taken, our family moved from Calgary, Alberta to Vancouver, British Columbia. Aunt Helen was in England. It was 1940, and something big was happening. I had no idea what. A few years earlier my aunt had given me a small box of toy cars for my birthday. I lost one of them the very first day and was very troubled. If my father had given me the gift I would have been afraid of being punished in a way that I always imagined would entail the same infinite retribution for offenses large or small. As it was Helen who had given me this gift, I was wretched with the notion that I might disappoint her, that she might be hurt by my carelessness. I knew that I’d have to tell her, and I did. I was instantly forgiven and learned early on to embrace either the praise or punishment from an honorable person and to avoid like poison the same from someone who was not.

Helen was enough of an intermittent presence early in my life for me to know who she was. When I turned six she was gone. We both spent the next five years at some kind of war, myself in the first years at school in the West End of Vancouver, she somewhere in Europe. The incident in my grandparent’s home occurred shortly after her war was over. That emotionally charged moment in the basement with my mother was the culmination of all that can happen to a woman that is unfair. She had seen too much, given too much and, my mother eventually told me, had been loved too little.

The chance Helen Ruthven gave herself at love occurred fatefully during those dramatic and pivotal months in the summer and autumn of 1940. Britain had been at war for nearly a year and was preparing for the worst. While stationed in England, Aunt Helen had fallen in love with an RAF pilot. In that place and at that time love was probably a frenzy of urgency. I would hope that she had departed from her characteristic restraint, and I would also hope she’d brought some abandon into her lovemaking. Predictably her lover was killed during the Battle of Britain late in the summer of 1940. He was one of the few who had given so much for so many. I suppose he also gave away a piece of my Aunt Helen.

With the solitude that her grief would require, Helen would later board one of the ships that invaded Europe and find a world vastly more miserable than her own. There must certainly have been a corresponding inner trunk she brought home as full of grief as the one I was sorting through that morning in my grandparents’ basement. I’m just as sure that she kept this psychic trunk secured until she was home and in the presence of my mother, who would be the one I would have chosen in whose presence to release a sorrow that once exposed, might never end.

Except for the scene in the basement and the fact that I never saw my aunt with a man in what might have been construed to be an intimate situation, there was never any outer evidence that she had been significantly affected by the loss of her lover. She would continue stoically and optimistically with a studied vivacity for the remainder of her life. What troubles me now, into my ninth decade, is that it took me so long to fully realize the impact she had on me. Certainly, my life would not have been what it has been without her.

We didn’t share many pivotal moments until I was older. I remember her earlier more as an occasional juncture between events, an epoxy that held many of the broken shards of the family together. Aside from my mother, she might have been the only adult presence in my family for a while. I can sometimes see her more clearly than I see myself. If there was royalty in the family it was held in Helen, not in a pretentious way, but quite naturally. Although it was out of synch with those about her, most particularly with the rest of us, her demeanor was never questioned. It fit. She was congruence itself.

don’t know if she grew up with it or borrowed it during her travels, but Helen’s voice pattern seemed to be some hybrid half British, half Canadian amalgam. I can’t imagine when a woman born in the middle of Canada would have acquired such a dialect unless it grew out of trauma, fixed in a time, during those agonizing hours of her great loss. Like an adult’s handwriting that betrays a teacher’s influence or parent’s abuse, her language, I suggest, is a tribute to love’s indelible imprint. There was an expression she used, a phrase she employed universally to establish that she had heard what was being discussed, while still holding the leeway to retreat to neutral ground. Whether it pertained to war, Canadian politics or the state of a foundering stock market, whenever someone had submitted their opinion, she would reply, Yes, well you see… here pausing in a manner sufficient to capture the attention of the House of Commons, framing an answer sufficient to the moment …that’s the thing. Isn’t it?

Helen Ruthven was able to fathom comfortably the depths of other people’s outrage but publicly never display her own. I never saw her shocked or angered, but in an immediate surge of humor I have seen the roof of her mouth and that full bite of teeth that she’d long ago despaired of hiding. She held her hands together most of the time, on her lap.

Her possessions carried a British stamp: her tweeds, her china, her car. She was a frugal, but generous woman. This Spartan attention to thrift was never reflected more purely than in her choice of vehicles. A Morris Minor was probably the smallest and least expensive car that had ever been imported to Canada. The hood ornament might just as well have had her coat of arms incorporated into it. It was totally she: functional and efficient. She could not be criticized for any of this, being the only member of the family apart from her father who owned a car until my sister left home and married a body and fender man. I have never been able to imagine my aunt boarding a public conveyance.

She chose first to save her money, take care of her family and then to spend a sufficient surplus on travel, art and always good whiskey. Helen could never afford the paintings her fine taste preferred so she did the next best thing: she leased them from some of the premium galleries in Vancouver. I learned to appreciate some fine art, certainly not by painting it, but by sitting in her small drawing room riveted to a spot on the wall where hung her most recently leased painting. It was one of the few times I’d ignore a drink she’d serve me.

From the time that she retired until she was no longer able to travel, she boarded a freighter almost every year and disappeared to a different destination. She abhorred even the suggestion of a cruise, choosing rather to almost become a member of the crew, usually aboard a Norwegian freighter. It was not beneath her to find romance while afloat. Many years later into my own adventures I met her in an Asian port and was introduced to one of the officers serving on the freighter in which she was traveling. I was relieved to find her with her figurative skirts in the air and catch a light in her eyes that I was afraid might have been extinguished forever during that sad summer of 1940.

I’ve known people who’ve felt invisible to their world their entire life. My mother saw me so completely that I felt it unnecessary that anyone else should, consequently I probably didn’t realize that they did. Only now as I give myself over to these memories do I see how thoroughly my Aunt Helen must have seen me. Today I’m an artist. I retired from a career as an illustrator and I continue to draw daily; I paint also. From as far back as I can remember I’ve had a pencil in my hand, often drawing. Instead of learning in school I recorded images in the outer corners of a set of notes I never really learned to take. Each Christmas or holiday event during my childhood a gift from my Aunt Helen would usually address this interest. She said I had a gift for which she would give me gifts. She gave me my first box of oil paints.

My earliest attempts to bring pigment to canvas were painful, bleak. I labored on one of my first efforts for weeks, returning to it daily, hoping that something had made it better or destroyed it altogether. It was a tired composition of dull, brown logs in a landscape with a sky painted a generic blue, liberally taken from the tube and applied directly to the canvas. I counted it a success because I managed to empty the entire contents of the tube onto the sky. It was a relief to rid the pallet of all of my paint. I hoped never to see any of it again. I believe my first failures at oil painting were enough to erase any pretensions of this alleged gift; at least I had hoped they would. Very early in childhood I learned to hide from those things I might one day claim to do well.

Not having to live with my failures, Helen was not so easily discouraged. She continued to urge me toward success. The art related supplies continued to arrive with each gift-giving season. My efforts were such that I hoped never to be given another set of paints again for as long as I lived. This wish was defeated on each consecutive occasion that called for a gift from Aunt Helen. Some would call it misfortune that they’d been taught never to say no. I count it today good fortune that I was constitutionally incapable of saying no to anything an adult might suggest, be it a beating or a blessing. Most particularly am I grateful that Helen persisted with the paints, the presence of which insinuated upon me an honest inclination to paint that continues to this day.

Not only did the paints and the brushes continue to arrive, but it was also explained early in my teens that I was to be tutored, at Helen’s expense, by an artist in his studio on alternate Saturday afternoons. I probably beamed obediently and displayed the obligatory mouthful of teeth commensurate with the required gratitude. The timing of these lessons was structured, not so much to make of me an artist, as it was to interrupt what I was becoming: a problem teen. I’d by now, in my earliest years in high school, fallen into what I thought was love. Like most of this age embarked upon a first love, the contents of my brain had been surrendered to the object of my affection. I believe she carried my brains and the organ to which they were most directly connected in her purse. Brain deficit and a constant spill of virginal testosterone lent themselves to an early life of sin and debauchery. I was not deliberately seeking to sin. I was just very much on teenage schedule. Clearly, I’d placed my life on hold until I had sufficiently succumbed to a broken heart. I had little armor and even less sense to protect me from the currents of my inner drives. I suppose it’s called character: that property that marshals the checks and balances sufficient for one to say No to an idle invitation and Yes to the obvious task at hand. I was not a bad person, just held hostage by an emotion I didn’t understand then and which puzzles me still. I have little patience with the man who will tell me he understands what happens when you fall in love. Anyone who can reduce it to a formula has not had the experience.

I can’t blame it on love. I didn’t know what that was. It would not really happen to me authentically until I was ready for love, or for life, years later. Time during my teens continued its inexorable passage, but I stood still. At a point when most men were moving forward, I seemed not to have the resources, inner or outer, to get past something. There was a point where I felt like I was going backward.

But, to understand that point and where backward would take me, I must start at the very beginning.

2

BIRTH

Z OE, my only sibling, was five years old when I was born. I’m inclined to trust her account. She was young, of course, but describes later in her adult years an atmosphere of camphor in the small room to which my mother and I returned just a few days after I was born in September 1934. Zoe sees me inside a small cloth tent surrounded by a mist of medicinal vapor. I had double pneumonia and was not expected to live. It’s unfair to say now, but I would suspect in the following years, that my father, a troubled man in many ways, trying to support a family during the Great Depression, might have entertained a small hope that I might not survive.

If there was a sense that I might not be well received, I’m sure it was born of the urgency pressing in that there was another mouth to feed in a family that had reached its logistical and, I’m informed, emotional limit. This notion of being unwelcome was ephemeral however, eclipsed by the immediate certainty that I was the most wonderful thing that would ever happen to my mother. Of all the sensations to which I was exposed as I entered an uncertain and hostile world, the strongest was that my mother loved me, almost foolishly. That assurance would never leave me for as long as my mother was alive.

Zoe, at barely an age to understand what was happening to her, was relegated to a secondary role that ironically worked largely to her advantage. My parents were in no position financially, nor was the small home we lived in large enough, to support another child. Zoe was sent to live with my paternal grandparents who lived in relative opulence.

My father, who had enjoyed the undivided attention and affection of his wife during the early years of their marriage, quickly became aware of another male presence in the family demanding most of my mother’s attention. He could not help but notice this powerful symbiosis between my mother and me, a connection that might have been responsible for an early animosity that grew between my father and myself.

In those early hours, days and months of my life, the family dynamic was transformed. The system was fragmented and apparently, a bit confused. I arrived and, as a result, the lives of everyone concerned were different. A newly anointed Dalai Lama could not have been imbued with more authority, but I was to realize none of this power. Quite the opposite, I was eventually rendered impotent by the alienation it engendered in my father. The governing force, sensing itself temporarily unseated, rallied with renewed intensity to assert itself again as the central authority.

It’s important to interject that my father was not a bad person. He was not consciously malicious. He was, however, troubled in many ways he did not understand. I believe he was controlled by forces all of his life, over which he had little charge. The energy of his fear, broadcast to the presence of a small boy, was certain to be menacing as it assaulted the membrane of a mother’s love. It was not he who threatened me, but the burden of some dark thing that he carried for his entire life from which alcohol brought him but brief relief.

I know now, from the perspective of a lifetime, that my father did indeed love me as much as he was capable, and he wanted me to know this. There are photos of us from our early years, walking together with my small hand in his or holding his coat or one of his fingers. I was held and carried and kissed by him. I know that he wanted to love me as my mother did, but no one could love at the level she did. In the face of her seeming infinite capacity to love, we were all to know an incompetence to do likewise. A more stable person would recognize this quality and not attempt to compete with it. Someone not so integrated would feel resentment. So, my mother’s love was a double-edged blade. Some allowed themselves to be embraced by it; others would strangely be infuriated.

If my father ever left me with the feeling I was unwelcome, my mother was a haven of such nurturance as to insulate from the first hint of his animosity, nor any notion of the poverty that would define our world. I was unaware of the dearth to which I was born. Having no reference to substance, I knew no want. I enjoyed the luxury of an uninterrupted love and therefore had everything I needed. I was in most respects a happy child.

Almost as critical to the issue of life and death when I was born, was the matter of where I was born. My pneumonia passed and life moved on, but I would not have lived as I have were it not for the fact that of Canadian parents I was born American. My father, Archie Ruthven, had been working in the oil fields for the British American Oil Company. My family lived in Coutts, Alberta near the American border, virtually blocks away from Sweetgrass, Montana. Coutts was not large enough to support a medical facility, much less a hospital which could attend to a birth. When my arrival was imminent my mother was taken across the border to Sweetgrass where there were at least modest amenities.

My mother, Jean Margeurite Wilson Ruthven, was a first generation Canadian, her parents emigrating from Scotland earlier in the twentieth century. My father and his family were well established Canadians, their ancestors also from Scotland, arriving in Canada several generations prior. Although a simple matter of geography and genetics in the beginning, in the long term the significance of being born American would prove crucial to my story.

My mother was an occasional writer, so there could be a forgivable element of fiction to her account. The delivery took place, not in a hospital, but in a home, the only available facility, inhabited by two retired nurses from Tennessee who had settled in Montana. During the recounting of this frequently told story, my father would sourly interject that these were probably new women, the antediluvian term for lesbians, hiding from their tawdry past.

Perhaps an occasional detective, my father deduced that nobody, especially two women traveling alone would move all the way from Tennessee to Montana unless they had done something wrong. My father’s mother, a stern and somewhat rigid nurse herself, albeit retired, would never countenance such a notion. No such scandal would attend her grandson’s birth. From the beginning, I have had strong women in my life, wishing me the best and attempting to protect me from the worst. My paternal grandmother was the empress dowager of all of these.

Mother spoke of an amazing bread pastry upon which she was nourished for the few days she was under the care of the alleged lesbians. She recalled with relish the delicacy she called Johnny Cake. It’s ironic that after all the years and mileage since Sweetgrass, I am living now in Tennessee and that Johnny Cake turns out to be nothing more remarkable than corn bread. I eat it infrequently. Unless it’s prepared, preferably by a person whose cooking skills are derived from a long Southern heritage, it can be very ordinary fare.

After the birth of a hefty male child, I imagine my mother was ravenous. Nourished on the modest diet of Depression rations and a slim budget and having just suffered the ravages of childbirth, anything was probably delicious. The memory of this delicacy would periodically visit my mother, a celestial vision imprinted, I suppose, from the delirium of labor. In this somewhat altered state she would become inspired to culinary excess that the rest of the family had hardly the heart to discourage. We were treated with mother’s current version of Johnny Cake, which was different each time, with questionable link to Southern provenance. She would likely appeal to some ethereal reference from the blissful memory of my birth. There was no recipe nor would there be any resemblance to corn bread. Usually the treat crumbled onto our plates as if it were our responsibility to reconstitute the particles and thus rescue it from its creator.

Literature was Mother’s passion. Cooking was not. She would lose herself in passages from George Bernard Shaw’s Prefaces or Plato’s Republic while something on the stove begged for her attention. My father was abusive on many accounts, but it was during meals that I could almost empathize with his impatience and annoyance. Her culinary incompetence was oddly a blessing to me. I never acquired the taste and therefore never developed a need for fine foods. I have an ordinary palate. Long before I would be subjected to her cooking, and for as long as was humanly possible, I ravaged my mother’s breasts, rendering them barren empty vessels that hung from her otherwise lovely little body. So, from the beginning I had exhausted every expectation I could have had for her to nourish me any further. Her body destroyed, she could cook me whatever she wanted however she was able.

Nothing so adequately preserves the image of my mother as a 1929 black and white portrait, now faded to sepia. She would have been eighteen and already have given birth to Zoe. Even then, her soul appears ancient, her generous oval face sad, exquisitely soft with full, voluptuous lips. Her eyes, that were a light blue and partially hooded by soft upper lids, send a message from infinity, from some kind and gentle reservoir of intelligence. Her head is crowned in a short Marcel wave of the Twenties. She appears to be what she was: a mystic.

My father, three years older than she, was slender and tall with shiny dark hair, parted in the center and combed back in a pompadour from a high, intelligent forehead. His narrow and handsome face, forever with a mustache, was usually crowned with a fedora listing at an impudent angle. A narrow aquiline nose bracketed dark penetrating eyes that cut through me like a knife. Throughout his early years he lived up to a later diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. He was his own favorite person. A snapshot of the same time sees him in bellbottom trousers, arms around my adolescent mother on one side and Aunt Helen on the other. He was the very definition of a rake: someone I would probably like to drink with and with whom I would end up in a rolling fight in the parking lot. Regrettably we would never do either. It might have brought us closer together.

Archibald Spence Ruthven met Jean Margeurite Wilson while attending a business college in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan some time about 1927. She was sixteen and, in my father’s words, a knockout. Archie would have had to have her – and he did. Not long after they met, they were married. Inside a year, Zoe was born. Clandestine paper messages were hidden, throughout our home, coded shorthand notes they would leave one another throughout intimate junctures of their day. My mother, when she worked, was a stenographer; my father’s occupation varied. They had both learned this arcane glyph in business college. As a child, although I could not decipher the messages, I knew them to be intimate, a collaboration of secrets they had colluded to keep from me. I treasure them now as romantic and entertain the real possibility that my parents might have been passionately in love with one another. They remained together, married and devoted, until my mother passed away forty years after I was born. My father became a complicated recluse without her. He drew further and further inward and eventually destroyed himself with alcohol, anger and disappointment. She was his infrastructure.

I don’t suppose our circumstances were worse than most families struggling through the Great Depression. A third of Canadians were out of work. It would be years before such assumed entitlements as family allowance, medical and welfare plans were launched, in large part on the backs of those who suffered through the rigors of this time. My father never missed a day of work. He would do anything to support his family. The stars in his crown, assembled during this difficult time in our world’s history, far outnumber and outweigh the minimal damage I might record in this narrative. Added to these heroics, I cannot imagine the psychic burden and added emotional challenge of a person with a serious mental illness just having to live with himself.

Because there was realistically only space and resources for two adults and one child in the home, my sister was sent to live with my father’s parents soon after I was born. My mother was certainly not going to part with me. So, my birth fortuitously provided Great Expectations for Zoe. Had I not come along and if she had continued to live in the circumstances into which I was born, she might not have been afforded the life that opened up to her under the guidance of a stern, yet loving grandmother.

Thus, for about six years I was an only child, and in many respects continued for my young life to feel that way. Zoe would essentially become my grandmother’s daughter. She was provided a classic, old world guidance in an atmosphere of relative luxury and substance which would contribute enormously to her eventually becoming a remarkable woman and, oddly, a surrogate parent to me, lending further the impression that I was an only child.

The years while she was being groomed by my grandmother, between my birth and her eventual rejoining our small family when I was six, imbued in her old fashioned parental traits to which I would respond when the messages from my mother and father were altogether too ambiguous or conflicting. At every age, she was a stunning female and very bright. This is not adoration or the projection of a loving little brother. Everyone who was to know Zoe, men and women alike, regarded her as lovely and remarkable. In God’s infinite wisdom and economy, there was evidently only a sufficient ration of beauty, intelligence and athletic prowess in one family for one child. I gradually surrendered any pretensions to any of these and admired them instead in my sister. I was by comparison average and ordinary, a poor student and homely. I would avoid sports, and I also developed a learning disorder. None of this detracted from the feelings I had for my sister. I was always proud of her and loved her deeply.

At the time that I was born, my grandfather, William Hugh Ruthven, was the superintendent of the Canadian Pacific Railway for the Western Division, headquartered in Lethbridge, Alberta. For a while my father’s pride prohibited him from taking advantage of his father’s position and accepting employment with the CPR. The gulf in any arena between those who have and those who do not creates a cruel division. This sort of fissure is only exaggerated in the family system. There’s a naïve notion by some that there should be no disparity of means and that resources should be distributed evenly across the extended family province. This is often not the case, as it was not in our family, but an economic distance had little to do with what went on between Archie and his father.

Had my father accommodated himself to the opportunities his father’s position afforded, our circumstances might have been different. The gulf between my father and his father had little to do with my grandfather’s position, but rather with a long-standing flash point that had been ignited before most of us were on the scene. I can’t recall a civil word that passed between my grandfather, whose corporate perks included an elegant mansion and a private railway car, and his son, who was questionably blessed with native charm, but cursed with a crippling pride as large as my grandfather’s achievements.

It had to have required a deeply entrenched stubbornness by both men to maintain the tension between them. I suppose that William Hugh Ruthven, who had helped to pioneer the Canadian Pacific Railway and had worked his way up from conductor to corporate office, preferred that my father likewise pay his dues and follow him, beginning at entry level, into the railway hierarchy. Instead, my father hung in a small sling during all weather conditions from the sides of enormous oil tanks in Southern Alberta, painting them for the British American Oil Company, his knees banging against the steel walls. He cringed in a lifetime of mediocrity beneath the shadow of his father’s success. I’m not sure he ever really emerged from this imperious overcast.

They disliked one another for their entire lives. I imagine my father stubbornly refused the offered favors of his father lest he be obliged to budge from some ancient line they had drawn in the sand, a line drawn so deep that it would eventually extend itself over time and genetics to gouge a similar gulf between my father and his own son. Their animosity took root, germinated, grew to term and blossomed for as long as I knew them both.

Thankfully it did not contaminate the somewhat reserved relationship I was to have with my grandfather. I loved my paternal grandparents, and, I never doubted, that they loved me. My own history would eventually take me far afield from that of my father and of his father, but while I was young there was a continuity among us, a shared element that would tie the three of our histories together: trains.

3

DERAILMENTS

F ROM my earliest memories, trains have been a haunting point of reference. I believe that there are intrinsic grids, girders and underpinnings installed in the early development of every consciousness - experiences and impressions that provide a seminal scaffolding around which the rest of one’s life is oriented. Primal to my early orientation were trains. Their imprint is long, yet intermittent, a thread that weaves itself through the earliest phases of my history, pulling the many layers of my formative life in place and providing the ensuing years some substantial direction. At a few points where I was scattered or disoriented, I have sometimes referred to trains, in fact or in symbol, to refresh a base line.

At points along the way trains have continued to appear as metaphoric messages, urging me on when the inclination might have been to hesitate. At other times, when I might be impelled headlong beyond any posted speed, they bring me to a resting place at some railway crossing, perhaps to forbid me from arriving at an intersection before it’s built. Here I might wait quietly, feeling the rumble and watching the blur of units pass, and become amenable to whatever guidance Nature provides. I hear trains today when other people might not. I live half a mile from a railway crossing. I listen for the predictable passage, during the day and late into the night, the haunting signature sound: cold rolling iron on rusted rails, the rumble of a hundred cars laden with coal.

In the late Thirties while my grandparents lived in the CPR mansion in Lethbridge, my mother and father rented a single basement room in a poor section of Calgary, Alberta. By the time I was four, my father had finally relented and obtained employment with the Canadian Pacific Railway. This position was sought at my grandfather’s behest but, my father insisted, not with his influence. Our financial situation had bottomed out. Nothing but the prospect of absolute penury would have caused Archie Ruthven to budge from the position in which he had been entrenched and persuade him to go to work for a corporation his father had pioneered. To his enormous credit, my father was always employed at something - anything. Surrendering a fortress pride, my father took a job at entry level, distributing supplies from a caboose operating out of the CPR depot at Ogden, a railway hub near Calgary.

Until he finally went to work with the CPR, my father had exhausted every menial means that men found necessary to support their families during the Depression. He sold Fuller Brushes, Watkins products - any domestic item that he could carry door to door. I recall oddly shaped brushes and attachments scattered across our cramped quarters. I still feel the bristles in my small hands. Mother describes my father rehearsing, with huge and charming histrionics, sales speeches while she tried not to laugh. As he went through his pitch, he would deftly insert the assorted implements back into the recesses of the carrying case with the alacrity of a soldier reassembling an Enfield Rifle, blindfolded. There was a neat symmetry between my father’s obsessive personality and the attachments snuggly housed within their tailored cavities. His emotional structure was chaotic, constantly at war with an intrinsically ordered nature. Compulsively precise and organized, he had little patience with anyone who was not. My mother, who dwelled in some oblique, intuitive, but benign netherworld, must have taxed his every nerve as she left laundry adrift or became lost in some astral contemplation while burning porridge sent its acrid odor wafting through the room.

While many people I talk to have little memory prior to attending school, I enjoy a wealth of blurry, but indelible images from infancy. Sometimes surreal, impressions of Calgary provide a psychic backdrop to my earliest recollections: The predawn murmur of a shortwave radio transmission throbbing from a small cathedral shaped radio, crackling static sputtering muffled, martial theme music and then a crisp, precise, military voice announcing with a British accent, This is the BBC direct from London. These broadcasts became the ritual background murmur to our lives as England and the British Commonwealth were gradually drawn into another war so soon after The War to End All Wars.

There is barely light in our one room basement home. A thick aroma of porridge, coffee and toast permeates the space. I lie half-awake on a sunken Chesterfield couch, my fingers probing the open knit of an afghan comforter, in which I’m enveloped. The impression of my five-year old form has fashioned an indentation into the couch. This is my bed, my room, and my world, and I loved it.

My parents carried a great weight of worry as they listened to the news of The War into which Britain, and thus Canada, were drawn. With no idea at all of what war or peace might be, I nonetheless connected the mood in the room with all else that was dire. However, this was my parent’s world, one to which I could not accommodate, and therefore to which I was happily oblivious. Innocence looked out through an infant’s optimistic lens. From the perspective of a recent release from a perfect amniotic environment, the life immediately before me seemed very probably not much different from the place from which I had just surfaced. I carried this illusion too long, but it served me at least through my parent’s difficult times of poverty and war.

I was almost five in early September 1939 when King George VI made his famous speech about yet another looming Great War. On September 10, one week after Britain’s declaration against Germany, Canada also entered the war. Until then, Canada had remained neutral. Later that year, on the occasion of the King’s Christmas message, he closed with a portion of the poem written in 1908 by the American Poet, Minnie Louise Haskins. I must have listened to these speeches. Every Canadian had. I certainly couldn’t grasp them for my limited understanding. What I did sense, though, was the leaden enormity of what was felt by those around me.

At some point during the following year a copy of Ms. Haskin’s poem, printed onto a small plaque, found its way into our home and, I believe, into every Canadian’s home. For most of my life I saw the plaque hanging on a number of different walls. As decades passed the words became imprinted in my mind so that, on a singular night long into the future when the moment was crucial, I could recall them vividly:

But I knew nothing of darkness in those daybreak hours of my life, only light, wonder and curiosity. Even my father’s concern, combined with a dark disposition, could not obscure the softness and luster of that enchanted early time before I was expelled from the womb of those early years.

My mother did little to discourage my illusions of safety and happiness. I’m sure it was all she could do to protect me from all she saw as threatening. Her immediate proximity was sufficient to this purpose. My first six years was an uninterrupted Eden. I didn’t care what else there was as long as she was there. A child’s impressions are more psychic than cognitive, so I believe I experienced a gradual eviction from Paradise as I came to know, by some telepathic transfer, my parent’s assorted apprehensions, the innate suspicion that there was something dark and looming. I could hear it in the tone of the shortwave reports of war, but more, I could taste it from the chemistry that the news elicited from my mother, a body food she transferred to me.

I believe I experienced my mother’s fear before I knew my own. Further, out of some inordinate loyalty or pathology, I borrowed her fear when I might have had none of my own. I began to look for it then and I’ve looked for it since - some version of that strange threatening atmosphere. Oddly, as I carried this characteristic into later life, if it hasn’t been there, I will sometimes grow lonely for it and attempt to create it, as if in the conjuring, I could also draw to me again the presence of my mother.

There was bound to be a similar response in my parents to reports of the war and to those elicited by the Great Depression. Still engaged in the trauma of deprivation, I suppose they saw no end to any of it. It was what life was to them then and what it was probably always going to be. Hope was a rare currency of the time. A large part of desperation, like torture, is the impression that it will never end. As I grew in this environment I borrowed their apprehension and learned early that there was something worse than War and