“Preposterous” – exclusive excerpt 2
I first attended a summer piping school in about 1972. It was run by John MacFadyen and held in mid-July of a truly sizzling Ontario summer, and my skin had been toasted to the colour of a brown loafer.
John and I at this time hardly knew one another at all. This school was held at Mac Campbell’s farm in the most southerly part of Ontario, in fact of Canada – hot as hell, and all held outdoors. I was off some distance, blowing my pipes, and as it was later reported to me, MacFadyen asked someone, “Who is that fucking Ay-Rab playing bagpipes?”
My mother’s family had some peculiar ways. Gramma and Grampa Glover owned a sizable piece of land on what was then MacLeod Road in Sudbury, about four or five acres. They had quite a nice house on one part of it, with a kitchen, living-room and bedrooms and bathrooms.
For some reason they gave that home to my uncle Stuart and moved into a house that was not much more than a shack on the same property. The home given to Stuart was sufficient to provide a home for him, his wife Helen and their five children. Stuart was a conductor on The Canadian, the flagship coast-to-coast passenger train of the Canadian Pacific Railway –all tricked out with fancy glassed-in double-decker observation cars.
Jack had been in the merchant Marines in World War II and had been torpedoed. He suffered a head injury and carried a metal plate in his skull that tortured him with unremitting pain all of his life. He married Marcia, a French-Canadian nurse, and they produced a brood of four girls. No one ever said it blatantly, but the marrying of a French Catholic pretty much sealed Jack’s fate. He was the youngest and might reasonably have been favoured, but this fouling of the Anglo-Protestant nest was too much for his parents. For the last several years of his life, Jack couldn’t work because of the pain. He received some kind of veteran’s pension, but Marcia worked full-time as a nurse and kept the family afloat. Jack had endless treatments at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto, at that time the place where veterans were sent, including, finally, severing the nerves that were thought to be the cause of his pain. He ultimately took his own life with a shotgun to the head on the back porch, where the girls found him as they came home from school. He obviously intended that they would find him along with several pathetic notes scattered about the house describing what bills were due and how to pay them.
Stay tuned to pipes|drums for the next exclusive excerpt from Preposterous, Tales to Follow in the coming weeks.
The book will begin distribution on August 1st and is available for pre-order now from Livingstone’s website.
Livingstone will be the official Guest of Honour at the 70th annual Glengarry Highland Games, August 4-5, in Maxville, Ontario, and a limited number of books will be available for purchase there, with the author signing copies.
+ Livingstone to be Guest of Honour at Maxville
Preposterous, Tales to Follow will be launched officially at an event at Piping Live! on Thursday, August 10th.
NO COMMENTS YET