Дорин Тови - The Coming Of Saska

always decided she was dying. Not usually on the telephone at 8.30 in the morning, though, sounding as though she was fading fast and asking weakly for Charles.

Panic-striken I fetched him, hovering anxiously while he spoke to her. ‘Put your teeth in, Aunt,’ he said almost at once. (So that was the reason for the feeble old-lady voice.)

‘No, you’re not talking to an angel. Put your hearing aid in.

No you haven’t, otherwise I’d hear it oscillating. Put it in now. IMMEDIATELY.’

All was well, as was confirmed when, more or less normal communication having been achieved, Charles said he’d ring her doctor and she quavered that it was too late now for that. The slightest thing really wrong with her and it was the doctor who rang us. Aunt Edith having summoned him personally, not risking any delay by dealing through intermediaries. Charles checked with the doctor nevertheless – who said that she was likely to reach a hundred but he, Dr Cartwright, wasn’t: not with Aunt Edith ringing him at six in the morning twice already that week to ask should she have All Bran for breakfast. And on we went to week two from departure date, when things really began to happen.

We’d been trying for months to arrange for the hire, in Canada, of a single-unit camper – the sort which carries its own water supply and refrigerator and has a made-up bed over the driving cabin. So far every firm we’d contacted was either fully booked for the season or its campers were king-size, luxury-type, and correspondingly expensive. Now, suddenly, up came CP Air with the offer of a small Mazda four-berth camper, based in Edmonton to which our flights were booked, and – it seemed like a miracle at this point of the summer – available from mid-July through to September.

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The Coming of Saska The manager of CP Air’s London office rang up and we clinched the deal on the spot – which achievement Charles, relieved to know that he wasn’t after all going to have to sleep out on the prairie wrapped in a blanket, celebrated by going out and putting in his runner-bean sticks. Ten-and 12-foot-high hazel branches which reared skywards like teepee poles and when Ern Biggs enquired why he hadn’t trimmed them off at the normal six feet – ‘To encourage the beans,’ Charles lightheartedly informed him. ‘It’ll give them something to aim for.’ Ern looked at the youthful bean plants, up at the heights to which they were supposed to aspire, back again at Charles with his mouth open and headed speedily down the lane to Father Adams.

‘They’ll have to pick the ruddy things with a ladder’, his disbelieving voice came floating up to us while Charles, already mentally at the wheel of our camper, bean-poled blissfully on.

So blissful was he that when, next day, there was a telephone call from Canada House passing on an invitation for us to be guests of the City of Edmonton for their Klondike Days festivities... and please could we let them have our measurements so that our costumes could be ready for us on arrival... Charles voted immediate acceptance of that as well.

We could hardly have turned it down seeing that the Canadian Government was sponsoring our trip but it gave me an uneasy moment or two when I considered the implications. Victorian costumes, they’d said. Charles for five whole days in a Victorian topper and tailcoat when he practically had to be straitjacketted to get him into tails for a three-hour wedding? Probably with a frill-fronted shirt and 42

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Doreen Tovey

string tie as well, and carrying a gold-topped cane into the bargain?

Leaving, like Scarlett O’Hara, the possibilities of that situation to take care of themselves, I concurred in accepting the invitation and we swept on to one week from departure date – when Aunt Edith rang us four times in one evening with the information that she was definitely weakening and if she didn’t see us again she hoped we’d enjoy ourselves; with a last minute flash of inspiration, as the swallows still showed no sign of moving out, we re-hung the garage door but removed the glass from a window high in the apex, so they could use that way in and out instead. Shebalu jumped out of our bedroom window, which I’d forgotten to close, at five o’clock one morning (that was all right too, though; she must have landed on the lawn and when I panicked downstairs to look for the body she appeared unconcernedly through the back gate, nattering happily about what a Fine Day it was and why weren’t the rest of us up yet); and Charles, small wonder after all we’d been through, developed a tooth infection.

We made it though. On the allotted day, against all odds, we finally flew out to Edmonton: Charles with a supply of penicillin tablets which he had to take every four hours; me a bag of nerves in case his infection got worse in mid-Atlantic. And suddenly we could see Hudson Bay below us, and there we were. Coming down over the North-West Territories... the Athabasca River and the barren lands north of Edmonton, covered with muskeg and dotted, as far as the eye could see, with hundreds of little lakes that looked, from the air, like puddles... And finally Edmonton itself, its tall buildings golden in the late afternoon sunlight, and beyond it the Canadian prairie, rolling away to the south.

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Five

WE COULD HARDLY BELIEVE it. We remembered Edmonton from two years previously as an outstandingly modern city.

The Oil Capital of Canada, with more than seven thousand producing oil wells within a hundred-mile radius. A city of wide streets, beautiful buildings, a magnificent University complex perched high above the North Saskatchewan River and an energetically youthful population – 72 per cent of them under forty years of age, according to statistics – whose brisk-looking brief-cased businessmen travelled by air-bus to Calgary or Vancouver as matter-of-factly as Brighton residents catch a train to London.

Now, driving into it in the airport limousine, we seemed to have gone eighty years back in time. A stagecoach passed us, creaking on its springs, a guard with a shotgun sitting beside the driver. Women swept along the pavements in bustles and flower-piled hats as though they had never in their lives worn anything else. The streets themselves looked 44

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odd... suddenly we realised what it was. The buildings had false painted fronts. Wooden-fronted saloons, a barber’s shop with red-and-white striped pole, an old-time jail...

the Hertz rent-a-car offices disguised as stables, offering mules for hire. Tied up at the Bank of Montreal’s entrance, where a sign said ‘Deposit Your Gold Here,’ there actually was a mule, complete with prospector’s kit of pick, shovel, gold-panning sieve and bedroll.

Another mule was tethered outside the Château Lacombe hotel where we were to stay – where the traffic was held up, to let the bus turn into the courtyard, by a frock-tailed Victorian policeman with a truncheon at his belt and where, standing in the hotel lobby while Charles registered us in, I felt like the principal character in one of those Bateman cartoons. Me in scarlet trouser suit and big sling air-bag and every other person in the lobby straight out of frontier history.

Even the group of businessmen emerging from one of the hotel conference rooms were in the appropriate gear.

Magenta, dove-grey and powder-blue tailcoats, peg-top trousers and elastic-sided boots. Not one of them looked in the least self-conscious, either, as one would expect men to be in such clothes – because, it seems, they do this every year and would look more incongruous if they didn’t.