The Endgame

Newsletter #87 - Going home

Toronto, November 17, 2024

Going home

I’ve just got back to Canada after a two-week trip to London. I was born there, and lived in London as a child. In 1954, when I was ten, my father decided that the family would be better off in Canada and took us to Winnipeg. In those days, post-war London was fog-shrouded and austerity-plagued. Many homes were heated by coal fires and there was food rationing. My father had read in an English newspaper that oil had been discovered in Alberta; this, said the newspaper, foretold great prosperity. Canada seemed like the promised land. And so, in an October seventy years ago, we left a gray and depressed Britain for the cold and snow of a prairie winter, looking for a better life.

Did we find a better life? You can never be sure of that kind of thing, but I think so. I feel as if I’ve lived in a golden age, in a golden place. I’ve become a Canadian patriot. My father was less happy about the whole adventure, but he was morose by nature. My mother was of a sunnier disposition, but she was resolutely English and a part of her always sadly yearned for the city that she had left. She once said to me, “If only I could, once more, look at London from the top of Hampstead Heath, I would be content.”

But, fortunate as I’ve been, moving to Canada was not without cost, a cost that continues to this day. Like all emigrants, I left home. Like most emigrants, I left behind uncles and aunts, cousins and friends. These are hard things to do and their consequences ring out down the decades.

I’ve been back to England many times, including four years spent at an English university. Each time part of me felt that I was returning home. Always I felt I was reuniting with almost-lost family and friends. Always, as I crossed the Atlantic, going east or west, headed for England or back to Canada, I felt I was leaving something behind.

On this trip to London I did the wonderful things that one can do in a world capital. I saw the Monet and London exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery (the picture above, of the Thames in fog, is part of that exhibition); Van Gogh’s Poets and Lovers at the National Gallery; John Lithgow as Roald Dahl in Giant; Mark Rylance as Captain Boyle in Juno and the Paycock (“I ofen looked up at the sky an’ assed meself the question — what is the stars, what is the stars?); the astonishing Lesley Manville playing Jocasta in Oedipus (see picture below).

But what mattered was not the pictures and the plays. What mattered was wrapping my arms around my beloved cousins that I remember so well from years ago and now see so seldom, laughing with them over lunch and dinner, picking up conversations with friends that had been paused years ago (or was it last week?), eating fish and chips in a pub with a long-lost, now found, niece and nephew. And walking the strangely familiar and compelling streets of London.

The novelist Thomas Wolfe wrote, “You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame... back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake...back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time—back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.” 

Thomas Wolfe, I think and hope, was wrong about that, although going back home—to your family, your childhood, to a young man’s dreams of glory—is a fraught journey.

*****

Some reader comments on Newsletter #86 (“The night”)

From a fellow writer: “My son has a recurring dream that he's listening to music he's never heard in his waking life. In his waking life he listens to a LOT of music, but these dream songs are new. He isn't a musician so he can't recreate them upon waking, but they haunt his days. He calls and says, ‘Mom, I had another dream song. It was so beautiful! I wish it was real.’ But it is real, even if only for him.”

From my severest critic, waxing eloquently and enthusiastically as usual: “Soto dreams, chauffeur Picasso to meet Dali!! What a glorious concept! Soto, Picasso chauffeur to Dali! Oohhh to dream. What was the car? Was it a fabled Stutz whatever? Was he an exuberant driver? Did Dali ever shut up? Did Picasso listen? I’m sorry I missed the dream.”

And this late-arriving lovely comment from a friend on Newsletter #85 (“Murray’s walk”)

“Your substack about memory and Murray was wonderful.

It made me feel less odd about something I've started doing rather recently: asking my father, who died in 2011, for advice. This is more unlikely than you might think, as I would generally not do so when he was alive and even tended to dismiss his views as old fashioned, which now makes me feel both terrible and dumb.

My father could be quite distant, even removed, but towards the end of his life that trait disappeared. Completely. He wanted to connect, he was warm, available, and loving. And as I have come to understand, spot on about a lot of things. 

He also had the courage to share his views, even when I didn't listen.

So now, sometimes when I'm struggling with a decision, I ask for his thoughts.

His answers are as they were when he was alive: thoughtful, balanced, informed by his training as a psychologist, and respectful. No pressure.

So, it seems that while death takes a life, not a relationship, as we know, that relationship can also change. Which makes it a living thing in some ways.”