About coming to Ottawa:
We docked again in Montreal, and went up on deck to see a display of out-of-this-world architecture. This was Expo ’67 in its planning stages; Habitat, a modern concept for modular apartment living was on our left, and Fuller’s Geodesic Dome could be seen in the distance. Other buildings dotted the landscape. The fair was built on an artificial island in the Saint Lawrence river, and the monster earth-moving equipment which had created the island was still in evidence.
Since we were now landed immigrants we passed quickly through the formalities and found the station, where we caught the train to Ottawa. We looked repeatedly for our cabin trunks, but were told that they had been checked through to Ottawa and would show up in the baggage room at the train station. They didn’t.
There was no sign of our cabin trunks in Ottawa, and we were told by a sympathetic station employee that he would personally keep an eye out for them; five large cabin trunks could not all have gone missing. The situation was complicated by the fact that we had no address or phone number where we could be contacted. We left it that we would contact the station daily and as soon as the trunks arrived they would deliver them to us at whatever address we gave them at that time.
From a phone booth at the station I called the Immigration Department and told them of our situation. I asked them to advise us on a good hotel, not the most expensive nor the least, which we could use as a base while we looked for an apartment. I heard discussion in the background and the voice came back and said the ‘Alexandra’ on Bank street. We took a cab from the station to the city and for the first time it hit me that we were not in England any more. We drove along the Queensway, the city’s main artery, where huge cars cruised along an ultra modern six lane highway. Intersections were enormous stone sculptures with roads above and below and massive ramps connecting them. In the distance we saw the skyscrapers I’d been waiting for, tall apartment blocks and office buildings, with the sun glinting from their huge glass faces. Turning onto Bank street we saw people sitting out on their verandas enjoying the cool of the early evening after a hot September day.
We checked into the Alexandra and the moment I walked into our room I was doubled over in a sharp stomach pain which blotted out everything for a few seconds. Helen went down to the desk and asked them to call a doctor, who arrived after only ten minutes. He poked my stomach and I threw up everything I’d eaten in the last two days. “Well it’s not appendicitis,” he said. He diagnosed a stomach flu and said from my condition I was probably well on the mend, but would feel rough for a few more days. Helen paid him $10 and he left. A maid came and changed the bedding.
On the television a man in an odd uniform was fighting with a giant lizard which walked upright and was as tall as the man. It was part of a new science fiction series called ‘Star Trek’. I thought it would be good to see some decent Sci-Fi on T.V.
Welcome to the new world.
The next day we sought out the Immigration Department and went in for some advice. The woman at the desk was unsure where to send us, but a passing young man said “Come with me, we’ll sort you out.” We went with him to a busy office, but when our helper called out that he’d found two innocents just off the boat and in need of a good Samaritan or two we were suddenly surrounded by new friends, asking about the voyage and why we decided on Canada. When they found out that I was about to start a job with the Civil Service our new friends turned into family. Helen mentioned that our baggage had not shown up and until it did we had only what we were wearing. Within seconds one of the men was on the phone to Ottawa Station. He came back looking glum. “They say the only luggage that’s come in over the last few days is for a Mr. Alexander Pushkin.” When we explained about the ship and everybody stopped laughing the conversation turned to our need for an apartment. A map appeared with routes marked from the Printing Bureau, in Hull, and there was a discussion about rush hour times and a comparison of various routes, ending in a recommendation for a place off the Merivale road. We were quoted a very good monthly rent and told that if our new landlord tried to charge more to get right back to them.
Before we left there was some instruction on how to use the busses, and we were even given half a dozen tickets. We left after a round of back slapping and hand shaking and promises to stay in touch. We caught a bus outside the building and went off in search of our new address.
I thought that Ottawa was probably as far from Doncaster as I needed to go.
Sideline: About Love at First Sense:
The sightseeing trip at Quebec City didn’t do it, for some reason. Neither did the switch from ship to train at Montreal. I took my first step on Canadian soil when I walked out of the station in Ottawa looking for a taxi. Something happened on that first step, the first sight, the first breath; I fell in love with Canada and it has only deepened over the decades. I often say that if I were to be taken up in an airplane, blindfolded, ears plugged, all of my senses nullified, I could still tell whether I was in England or in Canada the moment I stepped off the plane.
There are, of course, major differences between the two countries. There is above all the incredible size of my country. England could be dropped into any of the great lakes without causing much of a rise in the water level. The houses are larger here and built mostly of wood. The cars even now tend to be bigger, but in 1966 were possibly twice the size of English vehicles; the first car I bought came with a six litre engine as standard; larger motors were available if I’d wanted one.
It isn’t even the people, although the people of Canada are everything I hoped for in my childhood. In the Province where I now live nobody need ever be lonely. In Halifax, the capital city, sit on a bench in a public park and take out a map and within five minutes half a dozen people will have stopped to ask whether they can be of any help.
I’m closing in on my fiftieth year as a citizen of Canada and in that half century nobody has ever challenged me to a fight just for the fun of it, or because they felt that I hadn’t said thank you with enough sincerity.
It is all of these things and none on them; It’s about the atmosphere; not the air, nothing that applies to the five senses, it’s a feeling, something detected only by the ‘sixth sense’.
A woman I once worked with criticised my use of the term ‘women’s intuition’. “It’s no more women’s than men’s,” she told me, “But men are taught from the cradle to ignore it. Open up to your intuition and you may amaze yourself.” For me, the primary difference between England and Canada can only be discerned by intuition.
I am still depressive; I still need my daily medication and I always will; but I am comfortable here; I belong.
About the Government Printing Bureau:
We were well pleased with our apartment which came ‘semi furnished’ with the necessities. The landlord asked $50 more in monthly rent than we had been quoted, but a phone call to our new friends at the Immigration Department put the price back down. Our friends had also called the station and had them deliver our trunks to the new apartment so that they were there when we arrived. When we first met the landlord and asked him if there was any chance of getting a phone installed in our place he laughed and said every apartment in Ottawa had a phone. He called Bell Canada, who came the following day to connect our phone and give us our first Canadian phone number.
On the following Monday morning I caught a bus to the city and asked the driver (who was also the conductor) how to get to the Printing Bureau in Hull. He told me that Hull had it’s own bus service, and I must first go to ‘Les Terraces de la Chaudiere’ and get a Hull bus there. To get to Les Terraces I had to change, so the driver gave me a transfer. This meant I needed three busses to get to work, and I thought I’d have to get up at six a.m. to get to work by 8. I was not sleeping well and getting up early was very difficult for me.
I found my way to Les Terraces, and landed in a very busy area. Those inhabitants of Hull who worked in Ottawa were following my route in reverse. My map suggested that the Bureau was less than a mile away, and I didn’t want to get into a tricky exchange with my schoolboy French, so I decided to walk. Half an hour later I got my first view of the Canadian Government Printing Bureau’s principal residence. It was a huge grey building, shaped like a brick, and it was surrounded by a paved parking lot which was full at this time of the morning. More than anything it resembled a huge prison, lacking only electrified wire and guard towers. The main entrance was by way of a pair of huge glass doors in the centre of the brick and once inside I found myself in a huge atrium which could have provided parking for a dozen double decker busses. Two uniformed guards sat behind an impressive desk, over which a black on white sign said: ‘Visitors Report Here’.
The guards decided I’d probably need Personnel, but rather than send me into the depths of the building without a map the guard dialed a number on his phone and said something in flawless French. He told me “If you’d take a seat over by the staircase a girl from Personnel will be down to get you in a minute.” Impressed, I asked “Is everybody here bilingual?” He replied “No sir, only the French Canadians.”
A young woman came down and introduced herself, and I followed her back via corridor and elevator and another corridor and a short staircase, across a busy office to her small cubicle. She asked if my trip had been pleasant and if I was finding my way around. I gave her my new address and phone number and she looked up from her papers. “I’m sure you will do very well here, Mr. Daniels, your qualifications are most impressive.” She made a phone call and said to me “Mr. Zed is not in the office today, but someone from R&IE will be down for you shortly.” Five minutes later I said hello to Terry.
Helen had not been idle during this time. As soon as our phone was connected she had started to call computer companies as well as large organisations which she felt were ripe for the introduction of computer systems. In no time at all she had been invited to several interviews and by the end of the month was offered and accepted a programming position at close to $8,000 per year. We had come to Canada to seek our fortune and we had already found it. We were rich.
About the Laboratory:
Terry knew everything about the Bureau and everybody who worked within it, their job title, their pay grade, where to find them. He took me to an office complex which was like every other government office I’d seen to date and introduced me to the other members of R&IE.
“I’d like to see the lab,” I said to Terry. “Can you tell me how to find it?” “I’ll show you,” he said. I followed him out of the office around a corner to a bank of elevators. On one side was an opening with a sign reading ‘men’. We went in to the room and made use of the urinals, and I said “The lab, now?” “Sorry to disappoint you,” Terry said, “But you’re standing in it.”
The lab was behind schedule just about as far as it was possible to be behind schedule. Terry told me that he was the liaison between the Bureau and the Public Works people who would build the lab, and that now I was here he’d appreciate it if he and I could form a team, and go the next day to get things moving along. I said I’d be delighted with this arrangement. He found me a desk in a corner of the office and a chair to go with it, and one of the secretaries gave me a bag of office accessories – pens, pencils, erasers, staples and a stapler – all the standard goodies of a civil service job.
Zed dropped by late that afternoon just to welcome me to the fold and ask if I was settling in. I didn’t mention how disappointed I was to find that the lab was still a pissoir. Zed suggested that I spend some time making a list of supplies and equipment that the lab would need and then work with the purchasing staff to have it all bought and stored ready for the lab when it opened. I thought that was an excellent idea and promised to get on it. Zed left but then stuck his head around the corner and said “Get half a dozen of those lab chairs with wheels, and we can have races up and down the corridor .” I asked Terry if he thought Zed was serious but he said “Who ever knows with him? Get the chairs anyway.”
When the Public Works crew arrived to start building the lab I watched in amazement. Five minutes work with a wrench and a wall came down. Five minutes later the wall appeared elsewhere. Electrical wires were put in place as was copper piping for the Bunsen burners. In less than a week the men’s room had gone and a lab had been born.
An important characteristic of printing ink is the viscosity – the way the ink flows. Some inks are as thick as putty, others as fluid as water. I had a choice of two instruments which measured viscosity; one cost $200 but was notoriously imprecise and one which gave accurate, repeatable results but cost $6,000. I had an idea for that, and went with the cheaper instrument.
In less than a month two other technicians had been recruited, one of them a paper expert who had promised to do for paper what I had promised for ink. A lab Chief, John, arrived from Scotland and moved into his office. We were operational.
Missing in Action:
One winter morning after a heavy snowstorm Zed failed to arrive at work. This was not a cause for panic, as Zed pretty much came and went as he pleased. In mid morning his secretary took a call from him to say that the roads in his area were still blocked and rather that wait for the snow plough he was coming in on his snowmobile. The following morning when Zed had still failed to make an appearance the RCMP were called in.
We never saw Zed again. He had vanished in a flurry of controversy and rumour. He had chosen to live in a small community some distance from the city, and stories started to circulate that the mothers of small children had run him out of town when he had become more than just friendly with their offspring. It was not clear whether the offspring were male or female.
Personally I chose to remember Zed as I’d first met him; affable, always with a smile, and the man who had given me my big break.
About Public Relations:
By fate or good fortune the staff of the lab was a perfect balance. The new Chief, John, was wise enough not to involve himself in the ink side of the lab activities, nor in the paper testing under our new paper specialist. But John was spectacular at the thing the lab needed most: Public Relations. He would ask me in the mornings how things were going on my side, and I might tell him, for example, that an ink had been received which was coarse ground, a milling error, and had been returned for re-milling. He asked what would have happened had the problem not been discovered and I told him that it could have scoured the litho plate clean after only a few hundred sheets, and perhaps damaged the rubber litho blankets or even the stainless steel rollers.
John had introduced a system of ‘pink slips’ to record the details of defective supplies, and produced one for my faulty ink which claimed that, undiscovered, it could have destroyed a press, harmed the operator and quite possibly started a fire. He then made sure that everybody up to and including the Queen’s Printer got a copy, and within a few months people were saying “Zed was right after all; we do need a lab.” I hoped that Zed, wherever he might be, got a whiff of his post-employment fame.
I worked with pressroom staff and a young man from our financial group to come up with a realistic figure for losses due to defective ink through the previous year. We arrived at a figure of $85,000, which I thought was about average for a printer of this size. Now I had to ensure that losses for the following fiscal year were a lot less than that.
In the later 1960s the Federal Government was in favour of spending to create jobs, and before we’d been in operation for six months we were asked whether we could usefully employ an assistant each. The trouble with this was that we were classified at the Technician 3 level, which was used to recruit technical staff directly from High school. There was no level 1 or 2. We therefore ended up with three assistants who were classified at the same level as we were. To get around this we were all re-cast as Technologists, and new job descriptions were prepared. At the same time I was made Head of the Ink Section, and to celebrate my promotion (?) I had business cards printed. It would take two years for my position to be reclassified and it turned out to belong to the Procurement Category because I was involved with the purchasing function. It came out at the PG02 level, which paid $11,000 a year. I, however, was still a Tech 3, and to fix this situation I had to apply for my own job. Luckily for me I won it. Even more luckily, the appointment was retroactive to the time we’d recruited our assistants, and I got a back-dated pay cheque for $3,000.
I thought that being a Civil Servant had distinct advantages.
The figure for spoilage due to defective ink for Fiscal Year 66-7 was zero.
Sideline: About Mental Deterioration:
By the time my 30th birthday arrived I had to admit to myself that something was badly wrong with the way I felt about my life. I was not yet ready to say ‘wrong with my head’ because that would have been admitting to mental illness. I did not see life as others did. There were things wrong with me, though I still considered them as separate disorders. I would later come to see these conditions as satellites orbiting the huge central black hole of Depression, but not yet. I still suffered from insomnia. In 1967 we bought a new Chevrolet Chevelle, a beautiful, powerful car which I thoroughly enjoyed driving. In 1968 to 1969 my urge to be somewhere other than where I was had returned, and when I could not sleep I would be away by 2 a.m. driving through the Gatineau hills. Back in bed by six I’d grab an hour’s sleep before setting off to work. I suffered from hypochondria. I also periodically suffered from haemorrhoids, one of the consequences of my sedentary job, but my raging hypochondria immediately attributed my symptoms to bowel cancer. My fear of all things medical had deepened considerably, and the possibility of visiting a doctor about my condition was zero. I suffered from a constant paranoid fear of physical attack, a fear totally unfounded in a law abiding city like Ottawa, and a condition surely grown out of my early need to avoid bullies.
I developed a dreadful temper. When activated my temper gave me a greater physical strength than usual, in which I was capable of actions normally beyond my capability. I knocked holes in plaster walls with my elbows, knees or feet. I picked up a heavy clothes dryer and threw it across the basement. Coming up from the basement in a temper I threw open the basement door and carried it into the kitchen, torn from its hinges. I attacked a set of shelves with a woodsman’s axe, reducing them to kindling.
I knew at some level that this could not go on, and that I must seek help. I realised that an accident or illness could put me into a hospital for treatment, which would be a living nightmare for me. I resolved to seek help for my irrational fear of medical procedures. But not yet.
I did not suffer from low self esteem, which therapists of a later age would name as the cause of Depression. I had all the self esteem any man could possibly need, and I did not believe that I was depressed.