This was me at eight. Wide eyed and uncomplicated. I wish all of you could see our country through the eyes of a naive eight year old immigrant English boy. It was a sight to behold, special in the moment, special in my memory.

I remember when we were getting ready to leave for Canada, we stayed at my Grandma’s house in Wymondham, a small town in Norfolk. It was August 1958 and I was eight years old.

I have old photos from that time, bow and arrow in hand, wearing my treasured Davy Crockett racoon skin cap, aiming at a straw target at the bottom of the garden, my summer freckles apparent even in an old black and white. I had been given the bow and arrow to help me “fight off the Indians” in Canada. I still treasure that old willow bow. It stands testament to that moment in time, a silent sentinel to my heritage.

I suppose about now you’re making some gesture of disapproval, and if not, certainly of judgment. And of course you are correct. But I am not telling you about this to elicit judgment. I’m telling you to provide context, it is a reflection of where I began my journey, as useful a starting point for me as I can think. Post colonial England was my petri dish, cultivating my most basic values and attitudes from my earliest days. In 1958 that was my world, the backdrop against which everything was to be experienced. It was the only world I had ever known. 

For me it has been instructive. Our paths ahead are always informed by the path we have come. You can’t see where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been; in ancient times before sextants and other tools to guide a ship’s course, mariners would look back at the ships’ wake. If the wake ran true and straight, so too was the path ahead. It helped them to understand where they’d come from and where they were going, whether their path was true or not.

The train ride across the country was a spectacular adventure, my brother Clive and I bombing up and down the rail cars discovering no end of amazing things, all of it brand new to us.

“Mummy, mummy you have to come up to the dome car. You can sit there any time and there’s no roof, it’s just glass.”

“Mummy, mummy the porter says we can go to the dining car and eat at any time of the day and he says they have a cart full of cakes and biscuits and …”

My mother of course knew all that. I’ve often wondered how that same train ride was for her. I was travelling toward my exciting new world, my life ahead of me; she was travelling away from hers and everything she knew. It must have been difficult. 

And oh my, was Canada big. No actually, it was huge, by any standard. If you ever do have a chance to travel by train across Canada, take it; it is stunning and humbling. And through the eyes of an eight year old boy it was colossal, whatever that word meant. We had travelled the length of England by car the summer we left and it had taken us eight hours. After two and half days in Canada we had reached Winnipeg and we were barely halfway to our destination. 

I remember Winnipeg for two reasons. It was the first time I had been able to get off the train and as I descended the few steps to the station platform I was overwhelmed with a stench, that as it turns out was coming from the railcar’s toilet cistern. And the second thing? I had never felt heat like that before. It was hot and muggy and windy and dusty and if this was Winnipeg I was glad we weren’t staying. 

Most of us have a memory bank filled with images of things we have experienced. Me too, but none of them have ever trumped the impact of travelling through the Rockies by train, the impact on a young, impressionable English boy, as fresh today as it was then.

My brother and I were up early and in the dome car leaving Calgary. We had made friends with the dome car porter by now and he had promised to save us two seats. It was spellbinding, as if the invisible energies watching over us wanted to make sure this day would be unforgettable for these two future Canadian boys.

It was a beautiful clear August day and the images of that train ride through to BC remain vivid to this day. Snow covered mountains, their jagged peaks reaching into the bright blue sky. Waterfalls cascading into the rivers below. Glaciers and lakes and wildlife. A big antlered moose raised its head out of the water as our train wound its way by, chewing on the grasses he had just harvested. We yelped with excitement when our porter friend pointed out a bear with her two cubs, their fat little bodies rippling as they ran to the safety of their mother. It was a world we had read about but here it was, more exhilarating than anything described in those books. Seeing such things for the first time ever was thrilling for a young English boy.

From east to west we trained across the country, traversing a National Geographic version of the Bayeux Tapestry, forever telling a story, forever revealing its true wealth. Whatever this new country was, the one thing I knew by the time I arrived in the Okanagan Valley, was that it was big. I mean really, really big.

After nearly five days we arrived at our destination. Dad was on the platform when our train pulled into the Salmon Arm station. Ramrod straight in his blue wool blazer, starched shirt, regimental tie, pleated wool pants and mirror polished shoes, the summer outfit of an English gentleman. It was 95F (close on 40C) and we were thrilled to be together again.

It was all new. We piled into Dad’s brand new Wolsley, a beautiful mahogany and leather accented vehicle, a posh English made car, not made with the hot Canadian summers and bitterly cold winters in mind. But it was English and ‘better the devil you know’ had influenced his choice of family sedan. I imagine we were all eyes as we drove down the valley and into Kelowna, our faces flat against the rear windows.

Kelowna was small back then situated on the shores of Okanagan Lake, it was home to just 20,000 people and it was to be my home for some fifty six years of my life. In 1958, the Okanagan Lake Bridge was opened by HRH Princess Margaret, a physical structure which single handedly guaranteed Kelowna’s prosperous future.

Most people are change resistant, probably a function of risk management bred into us over millions of years. I have never been one for taking huge risks myself and I am not unusual in that regard. But it makes the decision my parents had made to move lock stock and barrel to Canada, halfway around the world from everything they knew, all the more extraordinary. They could not have possibly understood all that lay ahead. I do know, as I have reflected back, that it was the greatest gift I have ever received. And it was given at a considerable price, which they were both to pay over the decades ahead. All they knew, lay behind them. For me though, everything lay ahead.

I have so many memories from those early days. 

It was hot. Oh my word it was hot that late summer of 1958 in Kelowna.

Dad was dressed in his summer wear when he met us in Salmon Arm; winter wear for an English gentleman of my father’s station would have been a wool suit, paired with his regimental tie and the ever present mirror polished shoes. And in that first summer in Canada nothing had changed. 

Why should it? The British Empire had not been built on change, it had been built on imposing the ‘English’ way, the ‘right’ way to do things. A gentleman must wear the appropriate clothes; the temperature may change but the rules of dress would not.

Besides it was not as though there was much choice in the Kelowna of 1958. There was one clothing store. ‘Fumerton’s Clothes’ stood at the corner of Bernard Avenue and Pandosy Street, light on gentlemen’s clothing, heavy on seasonally appropriate casual wear. It was quite a change. That last summer in preparation for the trip to Canada, Dad had travelled up to London to a gentleman’s clothing shop which had been providing suits and the like for over two hundred and fifty years. It had not been stocked with Canada appropriate clothing.

And friendly. Oh my word these Canadians were friendly. A little too friendly for these newly minted immigrants, born into the highly structured courtesy of English life, formal and reserved as it was.

“Hi there, hear you guys are from England”, a perfect stranger accosted my mother at the grocery store.

“Well, yes we are.” came her hesitant reply.

“Well, we sure are glad to see new faces around here. We’ll be sure to drop by with some fresh pie and introduce ourselves. And I hear you have two boys. I’ll bring my kids by, they can’t wait to meet ‘em.”

It was all a bit overwhelming, for my mother in particular, born as she had been into the shielded, rule bound etiquette of polite company. 

“They are rather forward Jim. It does take some getting used to.”

And get used to it, they did. With time, mum would greet dad upon his return home from work everyday, gin and tonic in hand, her children instructed to give their father some time before they spoke to him. They had recreated a little bit of England under the overhanging tree by the creek in our garden, our ‘back yard’ as these Canadians called it. Our new home was just across a pasture from the Hotel Eldorado, a magnificent resort hotel opened in 1926 by the eccentric Countess Bubna-Littice. It was familiar for my mum and dad, standing proudly as a vestigial edifice to all things English and Empire, as once was. It was built in the Tudor style and had a gentile certainty in its presence. While everything around us was tossed on its head, at least we could be ‘English’ at home. Well at least until we could find our feet in this new place.

The Kelowna of 1958 was an interesting place, the population a tapestry of German Canadians, Indo-Canadians and expats, other Brits who had left the old country ahead of us, the rest a mixed bag of immigrants from around the world. There were indigenous Canadians of course but at that time in our history, they were largely invisible, the subject of disdain and ridicule, if spoken of at all. I wasn’t to know at the time of course but the recognition of the indigenous people of Canada, and a reckoning for the oppression we subjected them to over many generations would become a defining focus of our time. I would be witness to that history.

For the expats, Major and Mrs. James W. Peyton, MC ret’d. were a shiny new toy; they were embraced into that post colonial sub culture enthusiastically. And it was a good thing too. It is so helpful when change is afoot to have trusted voices endorse some of those changes. These people who understood what it was to be English proved to be very helpful.

When we were invited to our first barbeque we were thrown into the midst of a cultural culinary experience for which none of us in the Peyton clan were prepared. My father insisted that we cut our hamburger with a knife and fork and never pick it up with our hands. He also instructed us to remove the kernels of corn from the cob with a knife and then use a fork to feed ourselves. We were nothing if not obedient and did as we were told. All of which was greeted with much laughter from our new found friends.

It was the first time I had ever heard anyone pull my parents leg.

“Oh Jim, for God’s sake man, let the boys eat with their hands. We’re not in the old country anymore. Another gin and tonic ol’ boy.”

And so it was as we began to make our way, most change incremental and absorbed without note, other change tectonic but all of it keeping us on our toes.

I was a bright kid and had excelled at school in England. I didn’t know that and it was not something English parents would have self promoted in any event. By English standards of the time, there was nothing more unbearable than a precocious child, so I was left happily unaware that I was smart. When we arrived in Kelowna, we were both tested for basic age competencies and after some discussion, I was placed into Grade 4, a year ahead of my natural place. None of that made any matter to me, it was of no never mind at the time. 

September came and with that the new school year, my natural excitement heightened by not knowing what on earth was coming my way. Our entire family had been thrust into a world none of us understood and as a group we forged ahead. Some of the journey was inevitably going to fall on each of us individually. I do remember coming home one day, knees scuffed and my shorts torn.

“What on earth have you done Tony?” my mother admonished.

“Nothing mummy. I was just standing at the school bus stop this morning and one of the boys just pushed me down. He said he didn’t like what I was wearing.”

“Go and change then, I’ll wash those shorts for tomorrow.”

The next day I returned from school, dirty knees again, an angry scrape on my face.

“What on earth are you getting up to Tony!” this time the tone was sharper, more than concerned.

“Mummy, nothing. I don’t think they like me wearing shorts. They make fun of me.”

This was a confusion all around. In England at the time, young school boys would wear shorts until they were either 5’ 2” or 110 lbs. I was neither. And that was fine in England but apparently not so much in Canada, my shorts a cultural red flag to a school boy bully at the bus stop. When my mother finally came to understand that indeed my shorts were the problem, she took me down to Fumerton’s and bought two pairs of long pants, one khaki, the other blue. First problem solved. Next.

And this is me at seventy-two. I was right about Canada. We were the perfect fit; young, ambitious and full of potential, our best days ahead. It was the greatest gift I have ever received. I think I’ve done my part. I’ve worked hard all my life, we have four well educated and decent adult children and bundles of grandchildren arriving on the scene. Life is good. But about one thing I have become vividly aware, in a way that no eight year old boy could.

Make no mistake that this, all this bounty, the envy of people the world over, this can all be taken from us. We had a taste of it this past winter when a self titled ‘Freedom Convoy’ co-opted our glorious flag and presumed to speak for me and millions of other Canadians. It was one of the great observable ironies of my lifetime! And for the most part we let them do it. They were anarchic bringing Ottawa to a stand still for three weeks, disrespectful and unlawful. And what did we do? Well we were very ‘Canadian’ about it all. We respectfully sat back and observed the daily mayhem and chaos. We sat back and watched as a fundamental freedom of ours was being hijacked, in the name of ‘freedom’. We can’t hope to protect our country as it has protected us if we won’t stand up and be heard. As I have said to all of my children, more than once as they will attest, you must stand up for something from time to time or you stand for nothing.

It is time we stood up for our country.

As we gather for Canada Day, we might start by taking our flag back. Wave it, treasure it, let it remind us all and always that what we have is special and it is ours. When you next sing our national anthem belt it out.

“God keep our land glorious and free! Oh Canada we stand on guard for thee.“

Sing it like you mean it. Mean what you sing and be watchful in the years ahead. Never take it for granted. As it was for me, it is for you: To live in Canada is the greatest gift you will ever receive.

Happy Birthday Canada!