With each passing father's day, I think more about who really was Jim, my father. I have had some success in learning more about him when he was my age. Here is a wonderfully true and funny recollection by one of his best friend's. I hope that you see some of me there too.
To fit Wally's piece on him, here he is as Jim the "Chairman" - this was taken a year from his death aged 55. He is a year younger than me now. He looks very corporate but if you care to read the link above you will find that this facade was just a front for a totally wild man.
I think that I am getting the hang of this Jim. But what of the younger man?
For instance, who was this man? How did this young man become the man above?
Here he is in 1953. He is 27 and the pivotal years of his business and personal life are just ahead of him.
He was on his way. He had been the "perfect son". He had been the top cadet in his class at Royal Roads. He had been a Rhodes Scholar and he had just been chosen to be the ADC of the head of Alcan's European operations. He had married arguably the most beautiful woman in Montreal at the time who was also a member of that tight little Scots world that still dominated the business life of Canada at the time. He had set up his life to go far and to go fast.
I say the "perfect son" because I sense that he was driven to show everyone that he had the stuff. He had a meteoric energy and a fire that burnt like a furnace. What had driven this energy? What was the story behind him?
He was going to prove something. His was a story of redemption. He was going to rise like a phoenix from the ashes of his family's shame.
His parents had been financially ruined in the crash. Since 1933, they had lost everything but their names. They lived like poverty stricken Russian nobility after the revolution in their country house outside of Montreal.
His mother, who had been the wealthiest woman in Canada could never cope with the humiliation. Anna, once the life and soul of Montreal who had had 1,000 people come to her coming out party, who had sent her laundry to Paris and who used to use her father's private train for shopping sprees to new York was penniless. She could not cope with this change and had been in a downhill slide of depression, drugs and alcohol.
Dad's father, "Pat" was the perfect gentleman. He had only ever wanted to be a soldier. But out of duty had taken over his father's firm with his brother just in time for the crash. Incapable of showing emotion after 4 years in the front line in the first war, he had no answers for his now mentally ill and even violent wife. Not could he do any more but hold on in a business he did not really understand or enjoy. When war came again, he escaped his work and his family and wangled his way back to the army and then to England not to return until 1945.
So Dad became the de facto head of the family. His and his brother's childhood was over. The only person that they could rely on at home was their Nanny - Old Nan.
Nan had joined the family in 1928, two years after Dads' birth and stayed with us in one way or another, until she died in the arms of my Aunt Ann. After the crash she did not take a salary for 8 years. She not only raised my father and my uncle but also helped in the early years with raising me and my uncle's four children. Here she is with me aged 1. When she died, she willed every penny that she had ever earned back to her two dear boys. She is buried next to my grandfather and my father and keeps watch on them even now.
Nan's father has been the chief petty officer of the Royal Navy and had come to Canada in retirement to run the Mint. He returned to Portsmouth after his second retirement. The only foreign trip Dad and Robert ever had was to visit him in the 1930's with Nan of course. Being the ex chief petty officer of the RN meant that Chief Mullins had access to the entire Fleet and the boys were treated like royalty. I suspect that this experience was a reason why when war came, Dad chose the Navy rather than the army where his own father was a legend with 2 DSO's.
Here is dad in 1944, aged 18 just graduated from Royal Roads. He is with his brother, my namesake, Robert who is 16. The woman in the picture is not his mother of course but his aunt Elspeth. She and Nan were the only two women that Dad would ever obey. Nan and Aunt Elspeth were truly formidable. After my grandfather Pat, lost all his money, his two sisters demanded that their husbands, who were extremely successful contractors, lend Pat and his brother Hartland enough money to keep the wolf from the door. The brothers finally paid their brothers in law off in 1954 and then closed the family business advising their sons never to work for themselves. It's ironic that after that generation nearly all the descendants are back being self employed! But my father always had deep inside him a fear that if he went it alone, he could lose it all. In the end this was his downfall. How we take our family stories to heart!
So Dad's world began to collapse in 1933 when we was 7. I don't think that children of that age think much about money and prestige but the financial collapse put a terrible strain on his parents that must have been felt by the boys.
For many years neither would speak directly to the other and would speak only via Nan. This meant that at the dinner table, Anna would say "Nan inform Col Paterson that I will be out for lunch tomorrow." Pat would be feet away from Anna at the head of the table. Nan would say "Col Paterson, Mrs Paterson will be out for lunch tomorrow" He would reply "Tell Mrs Paterson that I thank her for the courtesy of keeping me informed. I will go to the club then" Nan would then repeat this verbatim. The boys would site mute or fool around with jill, the killer Alsatian. (My madness for dogs is in the genes)
Boarding for the boys, as later for me, was not a penance but was a refuge. As Anna became more outrageous, Pat withdrew. When Pat used his tight connections with his old gunner friend, Andy MacNaugton, to get a job in England, my father was on his own. The house was closed. They were homeless. The boys relied on their aunts to house them in the holidays. Their mother descended ever lower into her own hell from which she would never recover.
So what does a 14 year old boy do under these circumstances? What would you do?
Dad's response was to show them. Not only "them" as his parents but also the rest of "them" in Montreal. The Scots ruling class in Montreal were much like PEI today. Not only did "everyone" knew each other but most were related. When you are shamed in such a small society, you really feel it. He was going to show them that his family were not finished. These were the ashes that would feed his phoenix flight through his short life.
So what did I learn today, this father's day, as I wrote this?
I wish I had been more compassionate as a young man to a father whose own teen years had been so hard. My own sadness is deepened by the fact that my own son and daughter are such a compassionate friends to me. What a gift that would have been for him if I had had the heart that my own children have and had given it to him then.
What I cant do then in life, I do now. It is never too late for love. So dearest Dad on this, your day, I would like to offer up Stephen Spender's great poem for all those who burn too bright.
I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul's history
Through corridors of light where the hours are suns
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.
What is precious is never to forget
The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.
Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light
Nor its grave evening demand for love.
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.
Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields
See how these names are feted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life
Who wore at their hearts the fire's center.
Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honor.
Maybe next year, I will explore more. With luck, before I die, I may know him as I know myself. After all, what are we but stories?
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