Chiefs Island Lake Joseph Canada August 29th 2012
In June 1939 my Father turned 17, finished the academic year at a Canadian high school and spent the summer at his family’s cottage on Chiefs Island Lake Joseph in the lakeland north of Toronto. It was a hot summer and then, as now, the lake was a comfortable and care-free place to spend it: swimming, sailing, canoeing, fishing, hiking and entertaining guests at the cottage that combined comforts with a wilderness setting.
In the evenings the family hosted cocktail and dinner parties where discussion reflected the attitudes of the time: loyalty and reverence for all things British.
It is difficult to imagine Canada as such a country now and nor were many of its qualities even admirable. It was also a world very near to its end. In 20 years the British Empire would be nearly gone and with it the late imperial grandeur of the 1930s.
The British connection in Canada now holds nostalgia peculiarly indistinct. Uniquely among the older Commonwealth countries, there are few real ties and lasting points of contact in sport, culture or even the familiarity of accent, which means that the relationship is drained of real rivalry. Australians are robustly competitive with the UK – the basis of national identity and assertiveness. Canadians are not. For a country founded in opposition to the American republic the magnetic pull of rivalry and cultural reference is to the south, with the British link a sentimental memory.
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But in the late 1930s the link with Britain was very much alive. My fathers’ was an Anglo-Imperial family. His own father was a Colonel, decorated in the First World War, who flew nothing other than the Union Jack from the flagpole in front of the summer cottage. The family was already third generation Canadian by then, descended from millers who left Devonshire for Canada in the 1840s.
At the cottage on Chiefs Island in the summer of 1939 conversation concerned looming war in Europe. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s attempts to avoid war at any cost still had followers as did those, led by Winston Churchill, who foresaw epic struggle against totalitarian evil by allied democracies and even the survival of Britain itself.
I don’t know what my father thought of this. The pictures of him that summer show a tanned, handsome young man posing on the boathouse dock at Chiefs Island in a bathing suit and with his trade-mark brush cut, the haircut he kept for the rest of his life.
By the summer of 1939 Chamberlain’s appeasement policy was in tatters and Britain was reluctantly preparing for war but on much weaker terms than a year before when Czechoslovakia had been discarded at the Munich Conference and later invaded and conquered by Germany.
As the Canadian summer wore on the news from Europe would have been darker. By August the Soviet Union and Germany were negotiating a non-aggression treaty—the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact—including secret protocols for the invasion of Poland, making the British and allied commitment to come to its aid even more hopeless.
August would have been glorious in the way that a Canadian summer is. For a country with such bitter winter, summer is remarkably hot and made more sweet for being so fleeting. At this point my Grandfather took my father and uncle and left Chiefs Island for a wilderness canoe trip in northern Ontario, then, as now, a vast continuous forest navigated by a network of lakes and rivers.
For my father that canoe trip was a bridge between his youth and all that followed; between the calm and isolation of the wilderness he passed through in the certainty of my grandfather’s company, who had taken him on many such trips since his early boyhood, and the knowledge that all this was ending. World War II was days away and the peacefulness of that Canadian summer and the certainties of Anglo-Imperial Canada in the 1930s would soon belong to the past.
North America is generally not the source or site of the world’s problems and anyone living there or returning to it from far away finds unmistakeable its sense of safety and seclusion together with the freedoms and security that have made it a refuge for people from distant and troubled lands who do not take those freedoms lightly. Periodically, when world events intrude, young men have gone off to war to uphold those values.
One day the river they were following in their canoe passed under a railway bridge with a work gang and they called up to the navvies for news from Europe on the radio. The workmen called back: The Germans?—they won’t fight!
It was nearly the end of August. They loaded the canoe on a freight train that brought them back to Lake Joe and Chiefs Island and the comforts of the old cottage. My father and other young men typically slept in the upstairs of an old boathouse that projects over the water—anyone there drifts to sleep to the sound of the waves.
The next day was September 1st—a date that for Canadians then as now is the symbolic end to summer and summer holidays. When he awoke a newscaster on the radio was announcing that the German army had invaded Poland and Britain would declare war. My father said he knew then that his youth was over. In an Anglo-Imperial family there was no doubt what was expected of him. He returned to school that fall and completed his last year of high school, joined the Royal Canadian Air Force on his 18th birthday, got his wings as a pilot, was sent to Burma and participated in the Second World War.
The old boathouse is still there on Chiefs Island and when I return to Canada I sleep there and think of it as one of the most peaceful places I know. There is an old leather trunk upstairs with my Grandfather’s initials and rank on it from the First World War, but which are crossed out, and over them written my father’s name and rank from the Second. At times when I am in the Congo I wish that I had the old trunk with me.
Douglas Mason is a Canadian writer and consultant who works throughout Africa and runs a boxing club for former child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo.