In my childhood, two men personified fatherhood for me: my father James Evan Love, and my grandfather Ernest Huntley Clarke.
I believe that people are neither inherently good nor evil, while absolutely being capable of the whole spectrum of good and bad behaviour. It’s on that spectrum that I try to place my father and grandfather.
As a kid, I’m sure I had a simplified view of morality, of good versus bad, and perhaps I even excessively idolized my grandfather. I didn’t know about moral relativism or any of the conflicts or ambiguities that adults actually faced. My early values were probably rendered in the black and white and primary colours of the sunday newspaper funnies that I loved to read. Adult lives and motivations remained mysterious, and it would be years before I’d start to understand the contradictions that a dispassionate universe would impose upon grown-ups. The universe didn’t seem to care about right or wrong; it was up to each person to know the difference.
One thing I learned early-on as a defining characteristic of a good adult was how they dealt with responsibility, obligation, and consequences. Good grown-ups took their responsibilities seriously and were reliable in fulfilling them. Good grown-ups owned their mistakes. Bad grown-ups, on the other hand, were unreliable and inconsistent. I had seen that some bad ones even tried to avoid consequences altogether. Some adults could not be trusted.
So, that’s the lens through which I look at my grandfather Ernest and my father James. Ernest had seemed to me always reliable and responsible. He’d always held a quiet dignity, kept a regular schedule in his activities, taken good care of his health, and managed his affairs with care.
When we lived with him for two years in his house in Victoria, I observed how my parents seemed secondary to him. It was more than the respect that a guest gives to their host. It was like a deference that my unemployed parents granted. Ernest became their de facto landlord while we lived there; they paid him rent. Looking back, I’ve wondered if this grated on my father’s strong sense of self determination. Dad had always been a proud and headstrong man, but it was proper that under Ernest’s roof, James was not the boss of the house.
Ernest Huntley Clarke came to Canada from England at around twelve years old, as part of a group of Salvation Army Home Children. As he grew into his teens, he worked his way west from Quebec through Ontario, to Portage La Prairie, Manitoba. At eighteen, he enlisted in the Northwest Mounted Police, which a few years later would become the RCMP. He was a Mountie for thirty years, and was honourably discharged in Esquimalt, BC in 1948. After that, he held a variety of occupations in his later years, and in his early seventies was the manager of the Yates Hotel in Victoria, still working full-time, when we came to live with him.
“Mister Clarke” (as the hotel’s elderly residents called him) was a well-liked and respected man. I never saw him drunk, and never once did he seem to really lose his temper or lose control of his emotions. He led by example, stood with quiet dignity, and I admired him like nobody else.
In contrast to Ernest’s humility, my Dad seemed to have an active ego, and a need to prove what he knew in front of others. I think Dad needed to be seen as the smartest guy in the room, and to be seen to be in the right. I never saw him assert his intellectual dominance around Ernest though: I suppose that my Dad genuinely respected his father-in-law.
The trouble with a person who needs to be in the right is that often they cannot admit when they’ve done wrong. That was my Dad all the way through: admitting fault or (heaven forbid) apologizing for a wrong were things I never ever saw him do. All he did when confronted with a past bad action was get defensive and angry. I never once saw him apologize for anything.
My Dad did lots of good things for me and my sister though: he raised us alone after our mother had almost died and gone to hospital, he stayed employed and made sure that we always had food, clothes, and a roof over our head. He brought us new bikes for Christmas. Occasionally, he took us out for McDonalds or KFC, or drove us out to the airport to watch the planes land at YVR.
Dad did try to impart values of self-reliance to me and my sister Kim, but even his attempts at constructive lessons were framed by his bitter memories of childhood betrayals or grisly experiences in the army or as a firefighter. To him, the world was challenging, unfair, and absolute: you had to know how to fight to make your way through your group’s “the pecking order”. Dad taught each of us how to throw a punch, but not how to discuss or compromise.
My Dad was not in control of his demons, his addictions, or his temper either. He could be volatile and frightening when drunk. He could be violent, and we learned early that it only takes one violent and unrepentant adult to break your trust and undermine your belief in heroes. That’s why my grandfather Ernest remains so important to me: he seemed to balance the scales in life and remain in the light, even when my Dad was at his darkest.
