During adulthood our memories of childhood tend, as with dreams, to be fragmentary, unreliable, and to follow no consecutive order. Some incidents that we claim to have witnessed in those times turn out (if truth be told) to have been related to us by some older family member of our family. Yet, in the retelling over the years, how often they become our memories - our own stories.
Despite these self-evident truths, I have many vivid memories from my childhood and puberty; especially those involving my father - ones that range from his personal demeanor and the formality of his dress, to his behavior, especially within the family group. He was an impatient, illogical, impossible sort of man. He was also, according to the standards of the day, a moral man and, as recognized even then, a comical man. In rare moments, he almost became a loveable man.
His continual display of ill-founded prejudices, his predictable reactions to most situations, his indulgence in rhetorical statements, and his conscious role playing all made him come across larger than life. It is these qualities, especially, that make him an almost irresistible subject for caricature.
The world of my childhood was what we now describe as male dominated. Despite the occasional challenges issued by his sister-in-law, Father regarded that state of affairs as something ordained and, therefore, not remediable. Despite this firmly held view, judging from my own members observations, it was surprising how often the female members of the family managed to get their way.
In writing this anecdotal account of one family growing up in Vancouver's West End in the teens and twenties, I am by extension, saying a great deal about the mores and values of most families in the West End of those days. A constrained society to be sure but, on the whole, a more orderly and, because of its more settled values, just possibly a happier one than the society in flux that we see around us today. |
