IN HINDSIGHT, I am not sure whether the CNE or Charles Templeton was responsible for our building a cottage on an island in Georgian Bay.
Both Julian and I loved our work but sometimes it became too much and 1974 was one of those years. Julian was fighting a number of major legal battles; he was still involved with the Canadian Conference of the Arts; he had agreed to be on the board of the Canadian National Exhibition, and would be appointed chairman the next year. The Ex, as it was affectionately called, is an annual affair held at Exhibition Place in Toronto. It lasts eighteen days in August and attracts more than a million visitors. It’s supposed to be all about agriculture and technology, but as far as I could tell, it was about a bunch of thrill rides including a massive roller coaster and a midway where smart operators tried to talk you into contests to win plush toys. That part of the Ex was run by Julian’s client, Jimmy Conklin, and Julian loved to hang out there talking to the carnies, trying out the rides, eating hot dogs and burgers.
I have a photograph of Julian on the chair-swing ride with three-year-old Catherine and another feeding her a huge cream puff at one of the Ex’s formal events. She loved the cream and the occasion but threw up in the men’s room afterwards.
Jimmy had a private railway car on the grounds that he used while the Ex was on. We used to repair there in the evenings for more talk about more carnival events and food offerings. Gina Godfrey, Paul Godfrey’s wife, attempted to teach me how to dress and to wear white gloves while pouring tea for the ladies—a relatively painless task usually performed by the CNE president’s wife. Paul Godfrey, who was Metro Chairman, used to tell me how well he thought of Julian and how brilliant he would be as chairman. I have a hilarious photo of Julian with Paul in a horse-drawn cart, back when Paul had longish hair and a lantern jaw.
Julian hosted the annual opening events with celebrity guests like Bob Hope and the chief of the Clan Macmillan from the Scottish Highlands. Bob Hope failed to be even mildly entertaining, but Julian made up for it by giving one of his rousing luncheon speeches, complete with imitations of George Diefenbaker and Ontario premier Leslie Frost. The Macmillan event was grand, with the bands, the bagpipes, and the men in full regalia marching to salute our guest. The one small problem was that the chief had caught his kilt in the slats of the CNE’s wooden folding chair and couldn’t stand without taking the chair with him.I
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IN 1974 I was overwhelmed by trying to manage M&S’s massive publishing program and feeling guilty about not spending more time with my daughter and almost as much guilt about not paying more attention to the books. I had hired a live-in babysitter but I found myself racing home every few hours, in case she was not the right person. I had fifteen speeding tickets in two years and it was only my good luck and my obvious desperation that saved my driver’s licence.
On one of our frequent visits to Charles Templeton’s very simple wooden cottage near Penetanguishene, I mentioned that what we needed was pretty much what he had, a cheap country getaway. Charles had just finished a book for M&S, a new biography of Jesus, using all four gospels and “rendering” them in modern English. Charles had been an evangelist with Billy Graham’s Youth for Christ movement, exhorting the masses at rallies throughout the United States, Europe, Japan, and Canada to open their hearts to the Christian faith. Though he had left most of his faith behind somewhere, Charles still believed that Jesus had been an extraordinary man.
Now he was writing what he viewed as a “potboiler,” a thriller about the kidnapping of the US president. I used to read his drafts, while Julian listened to music and Catherine played with some wooden figurines Charles had. We would sit at his dining room table with drawings of the places he had used for the setting of the novel and go over the plots and characters. He had examined streets, security response teams, and armoured cars, and had invented the scenario as if he were, personally, in charge of the kidnapping.
Charles was erudite, engaging, witty, charismatic, and self-perceptive. He had intense eyes and a tiny, thin-lipped smile that questioned his own seriousness. He had theories and stories about everything: politicians, businessmen, God, novelists, humourists, inventors. He had invented a system for transporting oil from the Far North—but there were no takers; it was too costly to produce. He invented a coil filter for cigarettes that kept tar away from the smoker. Tobacco companies didn’t see the need for it, then. I think Charles’s best invention was a teddy bear with a self-warming belly that was eventually trademarked and manufactured as TeddyWarm by Mattel. Unfortunately, even that did not become a big hit. Luckily, the potboilers made up for it. The Kidnapping of the President would be a national bestseller in 1975.
He talked of the sense of isolation that Georgian Bay gave him, with its perfect view of the lake through the big picture windows and, stretching behind the house, a large tract of land where you could still see foxes and deer. He offered to look for a place for us, close enough to him that we could come by often, but not so close that we felt hemmed in.
Julian bought a small Hunt, an energetic snub-nosed boat with an inboard motor and a tiny cabin, where we could sleep curled up but not lying flat. Baby Catherine would snooze between us when she felt like snoozing, which was not very often. We scouted for cottages for sale in Georgian Bay, but as we had put all our savings into our Moore Park house, we didn’t have enough money.
Charles came to the rescue when he purchased a piece of land he thought we would like on an island across the bay from his place. It was not expensive and he was in no hurry to be repaid. We bought an inexpensive prefab to put up on what we used to call Charles’s plot. Before the plywood walls went up, we spent nights on the pressed recycled wood platform and heated Catherine’s milk over kerosene. We bathed in the lake. It was heaven.
My mother arrived from New Zealand that year and managed to withhold her initial opinion of our island refuge. She immediately became friends with both Charles and his wife, Madeleine. Her marriage to Alfons was not working once she discovered that he had an affair, but I didn’t think she would be planning to stay with us. We had always had a complicated relationship. She was too young—only nineteen—when I was born, there was a war, a long siege, and my father had vanished. After she clambered out of the cellars of the burned-out Buda castle where the family had taken refuge during the bombardment, there was nothing to eat and nowhere to live. My mother had moved into my grandparents’ still-standing house on the Buda side of the Danube, but they couldn’t keep the house under the Communist government’s rules about what a single family was allowed to have. We moved to an apartment in Pest that everyone hated. My mother found work as a surveyor of roads and railways with the occasional bridge thrown in for variety. I stayed with my grandfather, who had lost everything but seemed to delight in telling me stories. I saw a bit of my mother when she was on vacation, but on those occasions she liked to go on dates. She was very pretty and smart. Everyone loved her company and, as usual, there was little room for me in her life. I had assumed her marriage to Alfons would keep her happy, but it didn’t.
She decided to stay in Canada. Dudley Witney helped move her belongings into an apartment a few blocks south of our home. In short order, she started work as a town planner for a company on Eglinton Avenue.
I. By strange coincidence, the shooting party where I had decided to root for the pheasants had been at his estate near Perth, in Scotland. My erstwhile date for that day still lived on the estate.