The West Riding of Yorkshire, England, is where I awoke to the world, half way into the last century. In particular, I was hatched in the village of Mirfield, in an old-fashioned ‘Maternity Home’. My parents were Bryan and Joyce (Haigh) Holden. He was a British Bobby: she was a Mill Secretary. We lived in and around Halifax and Heckmondwyke in various police housing accommodations until I was five. By then, I had a brother Ian and my parents, my mother especially, became very tired of the relentless, Yorkshire rain beating down upon their heads. They decided to emigrate. The choices were Australia or Canada – Christmas in the desert or Christmas in the snow – being eaten by aborigines or by Ojibwa – snakes or bears, kangaroos or moose. Canada won, because it seemed to offer more opportunity for two, later three, growing lads and was closer to England. A quick scurry back to Yorkshire would be cheaper from there, if things didn’t work out.
My father, Norman Bryan Holden, went ahead to Canada while Ian and I stayed with mom at an aunt’s, mostly recovering from mumps, until the early summer of 1955. I may have been at school, but it was no more than Nursery School at that time. All I can remember about it was that they gave you free milk and that there were giant windows that I stared out of during nap time. There was also a tonsillectomy at some point in there and I remember being given a giant bottle of orange Lucasade and hiding it under my pillow so the scary nurses wouldn’t steal it while I slept.
My father, in the meantime, landed in Montreal and took the train down the line towards Toronto, stopping anywhere he thought they might have need of an experienced policeman. From town to town he went, but there was nothing until London, Ontario. Word arrived in Yorkshire and we three Holdens boarded the Cunard liner in Liverpool and spent half the journey seasick in our cabin. Then it was up onto the deck and the salt spray, but gratefully away from the stink of vomit. We landed in Montreal and rode the train through the June heat to our new home in a new country.
What strength of purpose my parents had! Leaving all the family they knew and setting off into the unknown had to be frightening. For that and for many more blessings, I thank them.
So, writing should probably intrude into this Bio somewhere here, but that would take a few years to happen. I was not initially bookish. That would have been even worse for me than being a little English scruff in east-central London where, for at least a few weeks, I was regularly chased home past the Redpath Sugar Warehouse on Burwell Street. The other kids made fun of my accent and my clothes. That I was a “limey” was bad enough, but my mother thought all students would wear short pants, knee-socks in sandals and wee caps. That soon changed. There were a few scuffles. There were bloody noses, banged knees and bruises, but eventually, I settled in. Interestingly, the school authorities skipped me past Kindergarten and straight into grade one. Still, no books, other than “Dick and Jane” and “See Spot Run”.
Not until we moved to better digs and someone thrust a sports book, football I think, into my grubby fingers, did I see any point to reading. From then on, the world kept opening up to more and more books and I devoured all I could get my mitts on. I still liked sports, but more and more, story books became my escape. Their created worlds became a better place to be than the succession of rentals we occupied for those first five years in Canada. Books also took me away from the quarrelling going on most nights between my parents. My father had very definite ideas about what boys should be and what made them into men. None of those ideas included dreamy sensitivity and certainly not the resentment and lack of respect he got from me. In those days, I had not yet learned to hide my distain at what I saw as his selfishness and pompous preening, as he tried to pump himself up to be bigger and more important than he was. And what he was, was never wrong!
Music then began to grab hold of me as well. I had a transistor radio that I listened to under the covers at night when all of the good stations came on. I was already a convert the night The Beatles were on Ed Sullivan, but that sewed it all up for me. From then on music drove a wedge between my father and I. “Look at all that hair!” he would exclaim, as if that meant anything to a generation just then coming to the fore. I was privileged to be run over, influenced and smitten by the music of the 60’s and 70’s. My father of course made music and the hair issue so big it eventually drove two of his sons out of the home. And John Lennon was right. The Beatles were more important than Jesus and the straight, narrow, conforming future my father had planned for me. I now play guitar, piano and saxophone
So, I escaped more and more into music and books. My mother always encouraged me, especially when it came to writing, claiming I was to be the first in our family to go to University. She saw Canada as a place where privilege dropped away and all was possible. In the post-war years in England, things had been pretty rigid. My mother would have loved to have become a doctor or a nurse, but how was working class girl from Pellon to scale those heights? Here, in this new nation, we at least had a chance. From then on, I was her accomplice. We were often in a struggle against my father’s set ideas that he had brought with him from “over ‘ome”.
“So, writing,” you ask.
Well, it is a short step from voracious reading to “I can do that, too!” At nine, I wrote my first short story about a cat with green, mesmerizing eyes that helped the weak and put-upon to exact revenge upon their persecutors. There were others, as well, all lost or absorbed into the works I later created. I wrote many stories during that time and even more when Miss Morgan, a dark and extremely fetching grade four teacher, taught me to write cursive in dip pen. I don’t know where all those stories went. Likely, they were thrown out when I left home at seventeen and worked to earn my way through the end of high school and into my first years of University. Eventually, I fulfilled my mother’s prediction, earning an honours degree in History and a teaching certificate.
Along the way, I held many jobs. I picked tobacco and suckered corn. I worked the line in a refrigerator factory and scrubbed the labels off lightbulbs that were wrongly stamped. I built trailers in Strathroy and cleaned test tubes in a lab. I ran a home renovation business with a buddy who later became a first-rate lawyer and poker player (enough said). I taught the deaf at a Community College and at a School for the Hearing Handicapped. I spent a summer labouring in a brewery and two as a fishing guide in Northern Ontario (see the novel, “Sanctuary Lake”). And always, there was reading and writing and music.
Then, as Zorba the Greek said, the “whole catastrophe” intervened – with teaching, marriage, mortgage and children. I worked as an elementary teacher, as a teacher-librarian, as a vice-principal and lastly as a principal. I wrote on a regular basis, from 5:30 am to 7:00 am, in small offices in our homes in Owen Sound, before heading off to work. I won’t call what I was doing “honing my craft”, but I did learn something about how I wanted to write, what seemed to work and what I needed to avoid.
I touched on ‘real writing’ by editing a teacher’s union newsletter, working on a local children’s magazine and, for one blessed year, taking a sabbatical and writing a teaching manual for school librarians. However, during those years, writing mostly took a back seat to working, living, raising and loving my children.
There were several publications, including a children’s story, a writing award for a humorous short story, a close call with the Globe and Mail First Novel award and various short story contest submissions. Only later, once administration work was in my past, did I begin to seriously consider novel publication. I worked, through Humber College, with an editor in Ottawa on a large part of what will soon be published as “Somerby Hall” and wrote and researched, at his suggestion, “The Duke’s Moor” and “The Moor’s Journey”. These were taken up by an agent who essentially held onto them for a year and produced no results. So I published on Amazon. In the meantime, I revised some of my early short stories, wrote four more novels, not in the Seven Ages series and eventually wrote the piece, “Red Mustang” that will find its place on the moon this year. (see “Shorter Works” for more about this.)
I have been living for the past thirty years with the most wonderful and forgiving, the most positive and happiest partner a man could ever want. We are blessed with four, intelligent, successful sons. So far, there are four well-loved and precocious grandchildren. I even wrote a novel about my love for my Sue, that I will, one day, publish. That will have to come with her permission and editing expertise, of course. She edits the pieces I write and always knows best… except when I do!
And the music and the reading and, of course, the writing continues.