Unheard Of: Memoirs of a Canadian Composer

3. Victoria: Childhood and Adolescence

3 Victoria: Childhood and Adolescence Existence waked me here. (James Reaney)1 Where is here? (Northrop Frye)2 [W]ho, if I may be so inconsiderate as to ask, isn’t egocentric? (e.e. cummings)3 I entered the world in a maternity home (“lying-in hospital” would be the English term) off Cook Street in the pleasant city of Victoria, British Columbia. The names resonate oddly. James Cook, on his last round-the-world voyage in 1777, sailed by the strait flanking the future site of the town in a fog and declared in his journal that the earlier claim by Juan de Fuca was an error: there was obviously no such body of water. His navigational genius is commemorated in many parts of the globe, as I was often reminded in later travels. Perhaps he can be forgiven this one blooper. Overlooking the inner harbour is a statue of the Great White Mother after whom Victoria, like countless places far and wide, was named. I saw an almost-identical statue of her in Albert Park in Auckland , New Zealand, in 1978. The one in the British Columbia capital is surrounded by redwoods and the one in Auckland by palms. Both settings have clashing cultural associations, imperial power versus “foreign” wilderness.4 The local daily in Victoria is still called the Times Colonist. As for the province, it may be a matter of time before some nationalist calls for renaming it: “British” and “Columbia” both echo European intrusions in the so-called (by the intruders) New World. A colourful premier in the mid-1900s, W.A.C. (“Wacky”) Bennett, replaced “B.C.” 41 with “Beautiful British Columbia” on vehicle licence plates so as to remind everyone of their heritage and simultaneously of the scenic splendours of rocky inlets, rainforests, and high mountains. It was a good place to be born and a good place to grow up. How much of what I retain of my childhood is memory and how much family legend? Probably a genuine memory: aged about three, I run into the street and Dad grabs me out of the way of an oncoming car. A photo records this one: I am tied to a stake in the backyard and wailing loudly (my histrionic streak emerging) at this “unfair” punishment. The legend is that slightly later Mother discovered me, trailing rope and stake, begging cookies at a neighbour’s back door. Another photo (I hope no longer extant) shows me aged three or four as ring bearer in a friend’s wedding, wearing a suit of pink satin. Another legend: I’m supposed to have said I liked Mother’s women friends because they wore soft fur coats. At age five or so, I heard a gossipy woman ask Mother if I was listening or would understand their talk (“pas devant …”). Sometimes I would show off without concern for whether or not I understood. In a volume of howlers from 42 • life, part 1 The Beckwith family, Victoria, 1931. Left to right: Jean; Margaret Alice Dunn, my mother, holding Sheila; John; Harold Arthur Beckwith, my father. school essays, I read a funny quotation,“Great are the pleasures of childhood , but greater still are the pleasures of adultery,” and repeated it for some of my parents’ friends. They roared, but I doubt if they regarded me as precocious. I had no idea what “adultery” meant, though clearly it didn’t mean “adulthood.” My only personal recollection of Grandad (Beckwith): when I was four or five he would take me on his knee after Sunday lunch and we would “read” the funny papers together (Dinglehoofer, Maggie and Jiggs, the Katzenjammer Kids, Tillie the Toiler, the Toonerville Trolley). I have a fuller store of retained images of Gran (Dunn): the tree in her backyard in the spring, bursting with Royal Anne cherries ready to be picked; her admonishments to passersby not to throw their litter on her verandah (as she detected their approach by ear—she was blind); her “old country” expressions such as“duck your tup’ny”(mind your head).When I was five and my sister two, we were baptized together in Gran’s living room, by a popular evangelist, Dr Clem Davies.5 It seems there was an Anglican baptism in Christ Church Cathedral too, but this more intimate occasion is the one that stuck in my memory. I recollected it many years later, and...