I have spent my entire life looking ahead, always wondering what was next, rarely taking the time to look back at where I came from. But I’m seventy one now and it is time to look back, or perhaps it’s just that I have time now to look back; whatever, it is high time. The other choice would be to look forward and well fact is, as a practical matter, that would be a much shorter story.

When my son Toby was young he would thrill in every experience, fully immersed in whatever it was he was doing but no matter how engrossed he became he would always, always turn to his mom and ask,”What next mommy, what next?” It was adorable of course. We would laugh about it at the time as we encouraged him to just enjoy the moment.

But what I have come to understand is that is what we all do. We all wonder ‘what’s next’ and in many respects the answer or at least our search for that answer is a filter through which we live our entire lives. Some of it is a kind of risk management, we’re more comfortable with the known than we are the unknown. But the rest of it is preparation, a kind of intuitive awareness that nothing ever stays the same, so I’d better get ready for what’s next. 

“What next mommy, what next?”

I landed in this magnificent country at the ripe old age of eight, a young freckle faced English school boy, more Alfred E. Newman, the face of the once popular Mad magazine, than Tony Peyton. It was August 7, 1958. My mother and brother Clive and I had just sailed across the Atlantic ocean on the SS Homeric. 

To that point in time the four day trip through stormy seas had been one of young Tony’s most exciting adventures. We landed in Montreal and were set to train across the country to meet my dad who had encamped somewhere in a province called British Columbia. We didn’t have a clue what was coming our way. I was jacked!

I had never quite understood how my parents decided on Kelowna, at the time a very small town of about twenty thousand in the Okanagan Valley. Not understanding however was not to diminish the significance; it was a decision of tectonic importance in my life, shifting the ground beneath me in ways I couldn’t possibly anticipate. None of us could.

My dad would tell us that it was all chance, that he’d simply put his finger somewhere on a map when he went to Canada House in London, a required part of the planning involved in emigrating to Canada. 

“Right then, that’s British Columbia. Good choice Major Peyton, rather hot you’ll find but a great place to raise your boys.” my imagined civil servant giving voice to the game of chance life can be.

The country was young and ambitious and needed people and had created a points system to evaluate immigrants. At the heart of that immigration process for a country still in its infancy, was a requirement that a family such as ours must be able to sustain itself and that had meant my father Mr. James Peyton MC ret’d., a professional soldier until then, would have to travel ahead and find work. Only then, on proof of employment, would we be allowed to join him. 

I wasn’t to learn until much later that the Peyton’s two sons, Clive and Tony, offered a valuable metric in the immigration process. Each young male son was worth two points on the application.  

But none of that mattered to a young Tony. ‘What next mummy. What next?’ was all that mattered on that hot, sweaty summer day in Montreal.  I wasn’t to know what was coming my way, nor that my life and the path it would take had been changed forever. I still don’t fully understand how it is we ended up in Canada. My father was a war hardened Edwardian son of old fashioned British parents, his mother Scottish, his father English. 

My mother Gloria was a stunningly beautiful young English woman, a talented actress on a fast track to a life on the stage and in cinema before the war intervened. They married in 1945, nothing exceptional in their lives, nothing exceptional expected on the path ahead.

And any examination of the path they took, including any decision to emigrate, has to be viewed through the lens of the times; post war England was rigid in class structure and roiling with political upheaval. The war had left Great Britain in financial ruin and broken as a geopolitical force. Change was afoot and it was not the sort of change to be welcomed by my parents.

“I will not raise my sons in a socialist country!” my father railed in defiance, a proud, conservative soldier who had “not gone to war to see that happen”. The short reality is that any choices made in those times, even one as life changing as moving your entire family to another country was made for the most part by the man in the family. Through the lens of the times in which we now live that will seem unbelievable but I’m not recalling that to chide my father or mother I’m recalling it to frame what I have to say. 

That is the world into which I was born. As I stood on the dock in Montreal that was the world I knew. It was my context and would be the filter through which I would experience my entire life.

Actually I’m not sure I could have written this until now, as I sit, most assuredly in the last few chapters of my own story. As with young Toby, as with all of us, I barely looked up along the way. I was simply too busy diving into whatever ‘was next’; young, vigorous and energetic I had an appetite for it all. 

My best days were ahead of me. 

Just like my new country. 

We would be a good fit.

But it was for me the starting point. It was where I came from which I need to understand if I am to examine where I have ended up. What I was when I was eight is all part of what I have become at seventy-one as I navigate my way on aching knees, with any luck, toward my eightieth year. 

And it begs the question: what the hell happened?

I began life as the young, bright son of British parents, one of millions of my generation set to inherit the wind. I was born into the birthright of an upwardly mobile British family, conservative by nature, Conservative in politics, the bailiffs of the platform upon which generations of Peyton males had stood for hundreds of years before my time. I represented the next generation of young white males to whom the weight of authority and power and influence would pass and I had no reason to expect anything was about to change. 

And yet change it did. Looking back with the impeccable hindsight of an old man, I can now see that change was the one constant of my entire life. And I don’t mean the wear and tear change of living, weight gain, sports injuries, and declining eyesight, I mean convulsive, volcanic, profound change. If young Tony was to succeed in this precocious new country, if he was to embrace the full opportunity that was now his, he would have to dance as fast as he could. 

Thing is, I didn’t know how to dance.

We boarded the train in Montreal. I still remember the excitement that coursed through my veins. It was all so big, and exciting. I never once had to ask, “mummy, what’s next?”. Back then, in that place, every moment of my life was brand new and invigorating, only ever giving rise to some spectacular, fresh experience.

As I approach the end of my life, I now realize that has been Canada to me; an amazing spellbinding train ride, around every corner something new, just over the horizon something challenging. How was I to know? What was I to do? 

I was born into a generation on the leading edge of extraordinary change in Canada. The nuclear family, rock n’ roll music, the sexual revolution, drugs, the role of women, feminism, war protest, social engineering, shifting power, loss of authority, gender equality, gay rights, gay marriage, voting rights, civil rights, black power, reconciliation with First Nations, the environment, the politics of vocabulary, the role of men, the role of young white men just like me, a short litany of the epic struggles that would be waged on multiple fronts. It was all in play and it has never ever stopped. 

Not once in my entire life has it stopped changing.

It actually sounds exhausting but for me it wasn’t, it was exhilarating. For me it meant change and profound change. I just didn’t have a clue what that would be and I didn’t have a clue how to deal with it. I just knew I had better be on my toes, on account of ‘things are changing Tony’, with or without you.

“Mummy, can you teach me how to dance?”