Born Naked Read online

  Praise for BORN NAKED

  “Like Twain, Mowat perfectly captures the essence of a more innocent era, as seen through a young boy’s eyes—and heart. And what a heart! And what a writer!”

  SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

  “Through both the notes and poems he wrote as a teenager and his own present-day descriptive powers, one is led to the writer’s personal Parnassus—its groves filled with farmhouses and maple trees, its muse covered in feathers and fur.”

  NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

  “While everyone is born naked, few are born writers… A warm, often humorous, always interesting account of the birth of a natural writer.”

  BRIAN BRETT, TIMES-COLONIST

  “Mr. Mowat did not pursue his alleged talent as a pornographer. He stuck to wildlife and oddball explorations and spirited comedy and is still at it, to the great good fortune of his readers.”

  ATLANTIC MONTHLY

  “This portrait of [Mowat’s] youth, marked by humor, sympathy, and understanding, possesses the crystalline clarity, brightness, and color of a child’s world—a world in which there already exist the beginnings of most of Mowat’s experiences as nature writer and activist.”

  LIBRARY JOURNAL

  Copyright © 2013 by Farley Mowat Limited

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd.

  P.O. Box 219

  Madeira Park BC Canada V0N 2H0

  www.douglas-mcintyre.com

  Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

  ISBN 978-1-77100-091-8

  ISBN 978-1-77100-092-5 (ebook)

  Cover design by Jessica Sullivan

  Cover illustration by Brian Tong

  We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

  Portions of Chapters 9 and 10 have been adapted from The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be. Portions of Chapter 15 have been adapted from Owls in the Family.

  For my companions of those years,

  both human and otherwise,

  and also, with a tip of my bonnet,

  for Peter Davison,

  who has guided my work for, lo, these many years.

  IN THE

  BEGINNING

  Now, God be thanked, those were happy days and

  we had enough sense to savour them while they lasted.

  Angus Mowat

  ON A CLOUDLESS AUGUST DAY in 1950 my father boarded a Trans-Canada DC-3 at Toronto’s Malton Airport. The airplane was eastbound for Montreal on a course which would take it not too high above the northern shore of Lake Ontario.

  Angus Mowat was always an excitable man. On this occasion he was stimulated to effervescence. Not only was this his very first “aerial voyage,” it would carry him over a coast with which he had been familiar as a small-boat sailor through most of his life.

  Puffing furiously on a hand-rolled cigarette, he peered raptly through the porthole. The world of his younger years unrolled below him, and he recited aloud a litany of seamarks as these hove into view and then were swept astern: “Frenchman’s Bay!… Peter Rock!… Colborne!… Presqu’ile!”

  Near the mouth of the Murray Canal, the plane tipped a wing as it lazily changed course. By then, Angus was squirming in his seat like a birthday child. He was over home waters now and approaching Trenton, where he had been born. When the head of the Bay of Quinte opened before him, he could no longer contain himself. He began urgently calling for the stewardess.

  She came at the double and a fine, buxom lass she was too, prepared to deal with whatever dire emergency might have arisen. Angus grabbed her arm and shoved her down into the window seat with, perhaps, just a touch too much fervour. She gave him the sidelong glance of a woman who knows herself to be irresistible and remonstrated gently, “Really, sir. This is hardly the time or place.”

  “No! No!” he cried with some asperity. “Look below, dammit! See that little island in the bay? That’s Indian Island! And thirty years ago my son Farley was conceived in the lee of Indian Island in the sweetest little green canoe that ever was!”

  Firmly removing his hand from her arm, the stewardess eased back into the narrow aisle. There she paused before replying evenly, “Congratulations, sir. That’s quite an amazing feat… in any colour canoe.”

  1

  THE WORLD INTO WHICH I was born in 1921 had not long emerged from a terrible war which devastated much of Europe and slaughtered ten million people. Canada’s contribution to that holocaust included eighty thousand soldiers, seamen, and aviators blown to bits, choked with poison gas, drowned in the grey Atlantic, or otherwise obliterated, together with two hundred thousand disabled “veterans,” my father amongst them, who came home bearing visible and invisible wounds which would afflict them to the end of their days.

  Apart from these unfortunates, the War to End All Wars left Canada and most Canadians in fine fettle. Trenton, a small market town in south-central Ontario, was a case in point. When the war began, Trenton had a population of about a thousand people, mostly of Scots, Irish, and English ancestry, clumped around a fine natural harbour where the mouth of the Trent River empties into the Bay of Quinte. The townsfolk mostly made their livings from quiet trade with the farms which ran northward from the bay shore until the good soil petered out in pine forests and hard-rock country.

  The war changed that. Between 1914 and 1918 Trenton was transformed. A military seaplane base mushroomed a few miles to the east; the population swelled and the town feverishly engaged in war production.

  The showpiece of this industrial transformation was a vast chemical plant devoted to the manufacture of high explosives. In the words of a local Captain of Commerce: “This progressive industry put Trenton square on the map of the Modern World at last.”

  And almost wiped it off again when, during the final months of the war, the plant caught fire and blew up. Fortunately it was distant enough so that Trenton escaped being flattened.

  Angus Mowat was born in Trenton twenty-six years before the big explosion. His father, Robert McGill Mowat (called Gill), was the son of a professor of exegesis at Queen’s University and a nephew of Sir Oliver Mowat, a Kingston lawyer who became premier of Ontario and one of the Fathers of Canadian Confederation. Because of these high connections, it was predicted that Gill would “go far” in the Church or at the Bar.

  But Gill was a soft-centred sort of chap who loved snowshoeing, sailing, writing poetry, and contemplating Nature, and was singularly lacking in what was then called “get up and go.” However, he was good-looking so he married well—to the daughter of an affluent Brockville furniture manufacturer.

  When I knew my grandmother Mary Mowat, nee Jones, she was a tight-lipped, disappointed woman with a jaundiced view of life. Doubtless she had reason to be sour. When her husband failed to achieve even the minimum requirements for a pastor’s post, and his Uncle Oliver’s firm tried but failed to make something of him as a lawyer, he was brought into the Jones family business. Here he made such a hash of things that the young couple was banished to sleepy little Trenton at a discreet distance from Kingston and Brockville both.

  Gill was established as proprietor
of a Trenton hardware store, where he soon demonstrated that he was no more adept at commerce than at the professions or in industry. Kindly to a fault, he gave credit (and cash too) to all who asked. He also tended to be so distracted by his poetic visions as to become a threat to the general public. On one occasion, he absent-mindedly filled an order for a dozen beeswax candles with a dozen sticks of dynamite.

  It was perhaps inevitable that the store would fail, but not that it would fail three times. The Mowat and Jones families bailed Gill out twice, then gave up. So he retired in his early fifties, a remittance man living on the income from his wife’s inheritance.

  I remember him as a slightly absent old chap with a long white moustache yellowed by the smoke from his calabash pipe. He spent a lot of time sitting in an old leather chair staring into space through rheumy blue eyes that, very occasionally, would focus on me. He always seemed surprised to find me standing by his chair, probably because his imagination was far distant, keeping company with Hiawathan braves and dusky maidens. He could have found little enough solace in his own domestic milieu, where he endured a terrible truce dictated by the iron disapproval of an embittered wife.

  Apart from having to deal somehow with the stigma of his father’s failures, Angus seems to have led a near-idyllic childhood. Small, lean, and wiry, he was a water rat, at home on the mashes (marshes), criks (creeks), swamps, rivers, and lakes where he became a passionate sailor of canoes, punts, dinghies, and anything else that could be made to float.

  An indifferent scholar, he nevertheless passed his university entrance examinations in 1913 when he was twenty-one. He spent that summer roaming the forests of Temagami in northern Ontario as an apprentice fire ranger and in the autumn enrolled in the faculty of engineering at Queen’s University in Kingston.

  In 1914 the Great War began, and Angus enlisted in the army. Within a few months, he had become a participant in the blood-bath that was overwhelming France. Early in 1918, German machine-gun fire shattered his right arm and he was invalided back to Canada. When he was released from hospital, he headed west for Port Arthur, at the head of Lake Superior, in hot pursuit of the woman who would become my mother.

  Helen Thomson was the youngest daughter of Henry (Hal) Thomson, who had been manager of the Molson’s Bank branch in Trenton until he made some injudicious loans. After the borrowers defaulted, Hal—his career in ruins—was exiled by his employers to Port Arthur, which was the Ontario equivalent of Siberia.

  During the last years before the war, Angus had been a determined suitor (one of many) of sloe-eyed, black-haired Helen. But her parents could see no future for her with the son of Gill Mowat and Helen herself was not much taken with Angus, whom she remembered as being a “very pushy little fellow.” She fell in love with a young artillery lieutenant who survived the fighting only to die during the great influenza epidemic at war’s end.

  In the fall of 1918 Angus appeared at the Thomson home in Port Arthur. He looked exceedingly dashing in his officer’s uniform, his chest covered with medals and his right arm in a sling. As a returning hero he was now much admired. Although there had been no improvement in his prospects, the fortunes of the Thomson family were in such decline that the elder Thomsons could hardly offer much resistance when Angus pressed his suit on Helen. Sad and lonely, in the spring of 1919 she softened and agreed to marry him.

  Their wedding picture shows him in dress uniform looking very much the dashing military man. Helen looks lovely, although there is something about her which presages uncertainty. Under the faded photograph is written in an unknown hand (not hers) the piquant query: “Whither away?”

  Whither indeed. Their first destination was a log cabin at romantically named Orient Bay north of Lake Superior where Angus again found work as a fire ranger. The newlyweds spent the summer “roughing it in the bush” in company with lumberjacks, black-flies, Indians, black bears, and mosquitoes.

  Although, as a wounded veteran, Angus was entitled to special consideration in government employment, his useless arm proved more of a disability than the ranger service could tolerate. In the autumn of 1919, the couple travelled south to the city of Toronto, where a job had been found for Angus as a clerk in a wholesale grocery firm owned by members of his mother’s family.

  This was not his cup of tea. Incarcerated in a rooming house by night and a counting house by day, he worked from eight until five pushing a pen and counting things. Whether he cared to admit it or not, he was his father’s son, and this was a life for which he had neither aptitude nor appetite.

  After a month or two he could no longer stand it, but his mother insisted he should stay. The Firm would look after him, she said. All he had to do was be diligent and in due course he would rise. That was the point. One was supposed to make sure of one’s future. And with his own father’s fate to remember, and the knowledge that jobs for cripples were hard to come by, he felt he had to try to stick it out.

  He tried. And failed. After a year of servitude, he let it be known that “the doctors” (nameless) had decreed that, for his health’s sake, he must find outdoor work. Everyone seems to have believed him, and it may even have been something more than an inspired invention.

  Free at last, Angus went right back to his roots. Having packed Helen off to visit her parents for a while (by this time she was pregnant with me), he set off in the autumn of 1920 for Trenton in search of a way of life which would permit him to live according to his own choosing.

  Eventually he concluded that his future lay in bee keeping. This was a decision in which Helen had no part. In truth she seldom had any significant say in major family decisions then or later. She was generally phlegmatic about this, although she once ruefully told me that being married to a man who always knew precisely what was best for all of us could be trying. Indeed, Angus was always very much the captain of his own ship and, if he was not infallible, at least he thought he was.

  After buying the bees and spending most of his remaining money on a second-hand Model T Ford truck (inevitably named Henry), my father went house hunting.

  The post-war boom, which everyone assumed would last forever, was then in full swing. Every enterprise in Trenton from the cooperage mill to the Chinese laundry was doing about as much business as it could handle. Everything was hustle and bustle, which meant there were few houses for sale or rent, and those which were available were beyond Angus’s means. In some desperation he took his troubles to Billy Fraser, the town tycoon and owner of the cooperage. Billy had at his disposal an enormous frame house of Gothic architecture, turreted and towered, which had been built by one of the lumber barons of the previous century. Now it stood untenanted, its paint peeling, its massive central tower gaping open to the weather, and its shingles falling away like scales from a scrofulous old dragon.

  Billy let Angus and Helen live here by grace-and-favour, as it were, and he let Angus cart away truck loads of hardwood scrap from the cooperage to keep them warm. Nothing short of a volcano could have properly heated that old pile but, by shutting themselves into the winter kitchen and two of the servants’ rooms, they at least had a roof over their heads and walls tight enough to keep the water from freezing in the buckets most winter nights.

  This was Helen’s first home of her own and on May 12, 1921, it became almost but not quite my natal place. As Angus described the event: “From his earliest years Farley had some disregard for the conventions. In the first instance he tried to get out when his mother was in the taxi cab on the way to the hospital, which was ten miles away in Belleville. He nearly did, too. Then, in the hospital, he’d be damned if he’d wait for the doctor, who was something of a slowpoke, so out he popped all over everything. The nurse said that the first thing she knew there he was. She said he rolled over, propped himself up on one elbow and gave her a kind of leer.”

  Angus was delighted to have a son, but not as delighted as he might have been.

  “I m
uch wanted a son who would become a salt-water sailor, perhaps a deep-sea captain,” he complained. “Well, Neptune puts his mark on those fated to go down to the sea in ships. They are born with a caul over their heads. This is Neptune’s guarantee that they will never drown or, if they do, that they will become Mermen and enjoy a rollicking hereafter among the Mermaids.”

  Alas, I had not even the vestige of a caul. I came into the world just like every other landlubber does—stark naked.

  We remained in Billy Fraser’s rambling old ruin through my earliest years, leading a relatively uneventful life but one which was not without its moments. I was painfully slow at learning to use the pot until a night in my second year when all the ceiling plaster in my room fell down on top of me. I used the pot diligently thereafter, fearing that the entire roof would fall in if I didn’t.

  Our diet consisted mainly of porridge, soda biscuits, and honey. Helen relied heavily on oatmeal. Being a bank manager’s daughter, she had been raised to be a lady. Four years in a convent school had taught her embroidery, how to paint with water-colours, how to declaim poetry, and how to sing in a choir. Nobody had ever taught her culinary skills, but she did learn how to cook oatmeal porridge during her summer with Angus at Orient Bay.

  To celebrate our first Christmas together, she reached for the stars and determined to bake a batch of mince pies. All might have gone well had she not asked the butcher for five pounds of mincemeat “and do please cut it from a nice tender young mince.”

  The bewildered butcher gave her five pounds of bloody, minced (ground) beefsteak, to which she happily added all the other ingredients called for in her cookbook. The resultant pies might have been hailed as nouveau cuisine tortière in our time, but not in Trenton in 1921. The neighbour’s dog got them and a chastened Helen returned to variations on the theme of oatmeal porridge.