Setting Sail
The Boyds set sail from Liverpool in September 1957. The Greek-owned SS Columbia was about to cross the Atlantic for her final voyage after decades of good seafaring service. Because the Suez Canal had heightened world tensions and resuscitated wartime memories, there was a general rush on immigration to Canada, and this aging ship, not recommended by the travel agency, was the only one available. As we pulled out of the harbour, receding into the mist to the poignant strains of “Auld Lang Syne” and the ship’s plaintive foghorn, I watched my grandmother standing forlornly on the rainy dock. How could I know what emotions were being unleashed? I was just a child heading out for an adventure.
We explored our cabin, anxiously watching the water smack against the portholes, then assembled on deck for a lifeboat drill. “Is there any chance of this ship sinking?” I asked tentatively. “Of course not, darling,” my mother reassured me. “So why are we practising?” I questioned, unconvinced, as I peered suspiciously at the icy green waters. Later a cabin boy sauntered along the corridors playing a hand xylophone, summoning us to the dining room. This short melody would later become the very first tune I taught myself to pluck on the strings of a classical guitar.
The old Greek who waited on our table fussed over Vivien and me, bringing us extra “poofed reese” for breakfast and treating us to pink ice cream at dinner. These desserts were delectable, but after ten days of gluttony the mere thought of strawberry ice cream became repulsive; to this day, I cannot bear it! Every day in the cigar-smoky lounge, I patiently crayoned pictures of the Canada that I imagined awaited us: a city skirting an enormous lake, ranches of wild horses, and majestic snow-covered mountains inhabited by grizzly bears. One afternoon while drawing, I overheard two ladies mention that in the evening there was to be an amateur talent show. I ran on deck to find Vivien, who was busy playing hopscotch, and convinced her that if we practised a duet on our recorders, we could enter the competition. Mission accomplished, I scurried back, ingratiating myself with the ladies, who registered Liona and Vivien Boyd. My mother was astounded to hear us rehearsing on our bunk beds, but promised we could stay up late enough to compete. Suffering the effects of the ship’s rolling motions, she was spending most of the trip in bed, nibbling dry crackers.
That night I made my debut on the concert stage. My six-year-old sister and I confidently stood in front of an audience of fellow passengers, played “The Blue Bells of Scotland” on our recorders, then curtsied at the applause. How grown up and important we felt as the ship’s purser bought us fizzy orange drinks. There was no doubt that we would walk away with first prize, I assured Vivien, but it was too late for us to wait for the results. The next morning I was dumbfounded to learn that a stout tenor had claimed “our” prize. I consoled my little sister by explaining that the judge had been unable to give us the award because we were only children.
Life on the SS Columbia was replete with interesting activities: swimming with my father in the indoor pool, where salty waters sloshed from side to side like an old washing machine, or standing in awe as swarthy Greek sailors tossed leftover food and garbage from the side of the ship to the seagulls or whatever hungry creatures lurked beneath the waves. On the fifth day of the voyage, a violent storm caused our ship to pitch and sway, her aged timbers creaking ominously. All night the sea tossed us around in our bunks; even us children felt nauseated. Two days later, rumour circulated that we had survived one of the worst hurricanes in years and were lucky to be alive. A boat full of German naval cadets had radioed an SOS to the Columbia during the height of the storm, but our captain held his course, aware that he had hundreds of young children in a ship long past her prime. The shipload of cadets sank with no survivors.
For the first few weeks after we arrived in Toronto, we stayed in the roomy house of the psychiatrist Dr. John Rich, who had invited my father to be the principal of Thistletown. My mother took us for daily walks in the drifted autumn leaves of Mount Pleasant Cemetery, where we tried tirelessly to tame the black squirrels and innocently helped ourselves to the pretty funeral ribbons for our dolls’ wardrobes. My parents were having difficulty finding a place to rent; I heard them anxiously phoning around after perusing the Toronto papers. Then one day we were bundled off to a cramped house in the heart of the Italian section off St. Clair Avenue and informed that this was to be our new home. Sadly, there was no secluded garden with a swing or a pear tree, but we were soon busy exploring the immigrant neighbourhood.
We had no pets, although our hearts were set on two golden hamsters promised to us by my mother for Christmas. Never at a loss for ideas, we decided to make do with a couple of crippled flies, which we persuaded my father to catch for us in the window of Loblaws. Rag and Tag were fed on strawberry jam and released to crawl around the bathtub each evening for their daily walk. Knowing that Westmount Avenue was only a temporary home, my parents chose not to enrol us at the local school. Each morning after my father set off for work, my mother placed Damien in his playpen and taught us English, history, natural science, and mathematics around the kitchen table. It was here that I began to write out poems and essays, which I copied meticulously into a notebook entitled “My Poems by Liona Boyd.” Every evening my parents took turns reading us bedtime stories — Pippi Longstocking, Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe — trying to continue our lives as normally as possible.
Finally, two days before Christmas, my father succeeded in relocating us to a house on Queens Drive in Weston, in the west end of Toronto. Bundled up in scarves and snowsuits, we were introduced to the trappings of Canadian winters: toboggans, sleds, flying saucers, and ice skates. What fun to speed over compacted snow or twirl around Daddy’s ice rink, created overnight with the garden hose. Even chapped lips, icy toes, and frozen mittens could not diminish our infatuation with these novel recreations. To enlarge their dwindling savings, my parents decided, in the pioneering spirit, to try their hand selling oil paintings. After all, they had both studied and taught art, and perhaps there might be an opportunity within Toronto’s burgeoning population. Late into the night they sat at their easels, surrounded by tubes of paint and jars of turpentine; we watched, fascinated, as my father’s canvases evolved into seascapes and bullfighters, while ballet dancers and flowers emerged from my mother’s. After a few weeks of industrious painting, my father set off with the finished masterpieces to the affluent apartments on Bathurst Street. For two disappointing nights he came home unsuccessful, but on the third returned triumphant after selling a couple of seascapes. Fired by success, my parents painted many oils, which hung around the house in various stages of wetness before being exhibited at art shows in the parks and in local shopping plazas.
In the spring we were delighted when our garden bloomed unexpectedly with thousands of purple periwinkles; the Queens Drive house began to feel like home. The hot summer months brought visits to the banks of the Humber River, where my father ran a day camp for learning-disabled children while Vivien and I built dams in the shallow reaches of the river or biked along the banks to collect frogs, insects, and wildflowers. One afternoon I persuaded her to “play dead” and lie with me on the highway’s hot gravelly soft-shoulders with ketchup smeared over our arms and faces. When, to our glee, a concerned motorist pulled over, we scurried down the embankment to hide in the bushes; the minds of youngsters can invent some macabre games. Besides the constant flow of stray cats to whom we gave temporary shelter, our menagerie expanded to include golden hamsters and rabbits housed in cages constructed by my resourceful father. In the late afternoons we foraged in the garbage bins of grocery stores, riding home on bicycles laden with leafy contraband for our pets.
Dolls and bears, including one compassionately retrieved from a neighbour’s garbage bin, were assembled every evening in a semicircle to play “school.” Each wore a brown cotton “uniform” that I had sewn, with yellow initials embroidered on the front. With this class of eager students, I explored creative ideas; one day I had them each write an essay on their origins, the next I painstakingly filled glasses and jars to various levels to design for them a water instrument on which I tapped out tunes spanning two octaves. Often I seemed to prefer the passive company of my precious bears and dolls to that of humans!
One summer we spent two weeks on a private island near Parry Sound, which introduced us to the pristine scenery of the Muskoka region, a cottage and resort area three hours north of Toronto. Lying on a raft of silver birch logs, I spent blissful sunlit afternoons afloat composing poems, while Vivien tender-heartedly rescued flies and moths that had fallen into the lake and little Damien splashed around catching minnows and crayfish in the warm translucent waters. With pine-scented picnics and campfire nights, we passed the ephemeral summer days of childhood.
Once again we were forced to move, as our home was sold, and after a temporary stay on Glenvalley Drive, we moved to a house on Burnhamthorpe Road in Etobicoke, another suburb of Toronto. We were becoming accustomed to the itinerant way of life: packing, unpacking, and changing schools.
During the fifth grade, I began to read voraciously, staying up late at night to immerse myself in the exciting worlds of Treasure Island, The Yearling, and Paddle-to-the-Sea, which told the story of a figure in a canoe carved by a Native boy living in Canada’s Lake Nipigon country. “Paddle” sets out on an adventure-filled journey of rivers, rapids, and lakes until he finally reaches the Atlantic Ocean. Inspired, I wrote about a girl who carved a Popsicle-stick figure and dropped it through the grating of a Toronto storm sewer. It floated on to have interesting encounters — meeting water rats, narrowly missing a sewage plant, and finally reaching Lake Ontario. Almost thirty years later, Paddle to the Sea was to become my sixteenth album and first children’s recording.
Although Canada was good to us, my parents missed England. I would often hear my homesick mother choking back tears at night; Toronto had not yet become home to Eileen and John, whose roots were tugging them back across the sea. One day we were told that passages had been booked on the SS Ryndam, sailing from Montreal. My father had been offered the principalship of a school in a year hence, so he was returning without immediate prospects but felt something would turn up. Out came the old wooden chests into which we crammed our belongings, one trunk containing nothing but teddy bears and dolls! My parents decided to leave behind with a friend the cheap Spanish guitar that had adorned our walls, conceding that it was too cumbersome to carry back to England.
We shared the comforting feeling of going home to the country where our accents did not obtrude, and where our friends and family would welcome us back. Canada had provided an interesting three-year interlude in my childhood, but I promised my bears that soon we would be playing amongst the daisies in a new garden across the ocean. I was certain that my mother and father were going to be happy again. At ten years of age, I had not enough life experience to know or understand the Chinese saying that cautions, “You can never dip into the same river twice.” Time is the great destroyer — you change; things change; life is a shifting kaleidoscope of places and events in which nothing and no one remain the same.