The Canada Story

Photographs from the collection of Bob Hart

Photographs from the collection of Bob Hart

Photographs from the collection of Bob Hart

I don’t remember ever not knowing the Canada story. Here are the essentials: my father and his friend Don left England to work on the Pacific Great Eastern Railroad, laying new track around train derailments in British Columbia. On a day off, they rowed across a lake and climbed up a waterfall to pan for gold. Don slipped and went over, and my father found him in a rocky pool at the bottom, bleeding from a hole in his back. Dad held him in his arms until help came. After weeks of recuperation, when Don was better, they sailed back to England together.

Many people heard the story before I did. There was the Bedfordshire girl who lived in New York City and put my dad up for a night before he boarded the QE1. There were my grandparents, who welcomed him home with a trip to Italy. There was his sister, who had married and was starting a family of her own. Soon there was my mother, of course, and my brothers, who are older than I and knew everything worth knowing before I did. The Canada story came up at holidays and parties, when the adults drank and laughed loudly and I eavesdropped at the end of a dark hallway. Most of it was too big for me to understand. The “hole in the back” business, for instance, is a piece I must have conceptualized around the age of eight or nine, before I had a proper understanding of anatomy.

I love every part of the Canada story—the escape from dreary England, the call of the railroad tearing a path through a dense and scratchy wilderness, the image of my buttoned-down father prospecting for gold. It’s absurd to me now. Impossible to believe that my father could have had genuine hopes of striking it rich with a sieve and a pan, although as I grew up in California, it helped to picture the gold rush in such familiar terms

My father remembers everything about that year. It was 1956, the year of the Suez Canal crisis, and he was almost nineteen. At the embassies in London, long lines of young men applied for visas to Australia, New Zealand and South Africa to escape the building conflict, but my father and his friend Don were only interested in escaping Bedfordshire. They were friends from the meteorological office, where they broadcast weather reports for the armed forces radio. They worked three shifts on rotation, and when it was their turn for the night shift, they camped out in the sound studio, talking and sleeping in turns. Don brought his dog, and a primus stove for cooking eggs and bacon. The men slept in bags on the floor; the dog slept in a wastebasket full of ticket tape.

They were down on themselves. Don had rolled the family car, and his father was on him to get serious. My father had been released from his RAF contract and thought his life was over. They were two years apart; both had been local boys in a boarding school that had matriculated Gary Cooper, Sam Kidd and the executed president of Pakistan. They’d placed high in their classes but were cut from a different cloth than the residential students. After final exams, my father drove to the RAF base about thirty miles away. He’d been a small boy during the war, but he remembered certain things about it with a Technicolor nostalgia: Hannah, the Dutch refugee his mother had taken in and to whom he’d had to give up his room; the American officers who used the heath as a landing field; being paid in candy bars to introduce the airmen to Hannah—later, he fed all the candy bars through a chain-link fence around the football...