Signing in
Robert Gore-langton goes in search of his Canadian cousins
I’d never been to Canada let alone British Columbia and never met my cousins who live there. So late this summer my family — five of us — set off to Vancouver Island, a long thin strip of land the length of England, a couple of hours by ferry from the city of Vancouver. It’s a gorgeous place of mountains, trees and bears…. plus a handful of Gore-langtons who have been happily stranded there since the 19th century.
All my life, I’d heard fond references to ‘BC’ from my father. He and his sister Elspeth were born on the island in the 1920s and grew up in the warm Cowichan Bay area, 30 minutes north of Victoria, the province’s parliamentary capital. My grandfather, Evelyn, built the house in around 1920. It was a modest wood and plaster building, a bit like a ski chalet. It had a fearsome cougar skin rug, a green baize door, a range cooker, and was in the middle of nowhere.
On their small-holding my grandparents kept a sow, a goat, a shire horse called Marble, and assorted Labradors. They had an Indian servant (First Nation is the acceptable term nowadays) called Rosalie. My grandmother once asked her what her husband did and she replied: ‘Him sit home all day making bottom side flat.’
Our second son, Kit, works as a furniture maker in BC, happily living in a van in a supermarket car park. He has been there a year, living off Pringles and washing his socks about twice in that time. To him our rented motorhome was sheer luxury. It had a flushing loo, a kitchen, a double bed, a leather swivel chair. And best of all a fridge which we rammed with beer. Our first stop was to park it on the drive of our cousin Dickie — a winemaker — and his wife Michelle, near Victoria. Our twentysomething children feared stiff people and stiff, formal meals. They found nothing but laughter, much eating, addictive home brew and great chat. We became firm friends in about 30 seconds.
Dickie’s father’s place is nearby — an historic log house of huge charm. Bevan Gore-langton, 85, is a legend on the west coast. He was a professional jazz pianist — he once played with The Ink Spots — and a great collector, mostly of exquisite old motorbikes, artefacts, and vintage cast-iron frying pans of which he has over a thousand. His pride and joy is a Francis-barnett – a ‘Fanny-b’ — motorcycle. In 1953, he bought it new from the factory in Coventry. He and a friend drove it around a bombed-out Europe on an epic road trip. Recently, he tracked down the very same bike and re-bought it and ‘Bev’ burns around the island on it.
We had a great reunion with his family, trying to work out how we all fitted in. My grandparents actually met out in BC. My grandmother was called Irene Gartside-spaight; she was known as Winkie and she had two sisters called Dot and Brownie. Their parents had gone to Canada after being burned out of their home in Ireland by Fenians who warned them on pain of death never to return.
Winkie picked up my grandfather when he was hitch-hiking and they fell in love. My grandfather was a navy commander in the First World War and afterwards joined the Survey Department with HMS Egeria in BC. I got the impression that he hadn’t much money which didn’t matter back then as there wasn’t much to spend it on. You seldom think of your grandparents as young people. But it was rather moving to imagine them showered in confetti on the steps of a pretty, wooden church of St Peter’s that we visited on the edge of the small town of Duncan. Judging by the quiltmaking circle of ladies I got chatting to in the parish hall, the place is fiercely royalist.
The next plan on our tour — and by now our three children were almost enjoying being with their parents — was to cruise down the lonely Gore-langton Road (the sign was a great thrill) and try to find my grandparents’ house which we knew was up a long dirt track somewhere. I knocked on the nearest door and announced my name with a note of self-importance. ‘Hey, you got a road named after you, mister,’ came the friendly reply. We were soon led to the farmstead. There it was, nestled beneath Mount Tzouhalem, named after a mad, murderous chieftan who had 14 wives, most of whom had been widowed by him. The mountain was known locally as Pip’oom, meaning ‘little swelled-up one’ because a frog basked there in the sun after the great flood of the world subsided and turned into a mighty mound of granite.
The current owner generously showed us around. The interior was pretty recognisable from my father’s diary, written up decades later. It was done out in tongue and groove cedar and bathed in calm. The cougar skin had long gone. But I was
delighted to see, intact, my grandparents bedroom with its balcony where my father and his younger sister slept as little children, often waking up with a dusting of snow on their blankets in winter. They thought it was magical. Now it would be considered child neglect.
Circled by eagles and with views of water and pasture, no wonder Tzouhalem never left my father’s heart. The family returned for various reasons to England in the mid-1930s, settling in an idyllic spot in Cornwall. Winkie had a pet crow called Maria that lived on her shoulder. I can just about remember her as a wonderfully indulgent granny. Since returning home, I have discovered a photograph of her as a 24-year-old ambulance driver and nurse, standing on top of a destroyed tank in No Man’s Land in 1916. What lives that generation led…
It was a tremendous, restoring trip — and great to bask in the hospitality of our new-found Canadian rellies. Once back, I dashed down to Cornwall to see my aunt Elspeth (now in her nineties) and show her our photos of her idyllic childhood home. Her recent memory isn’t brilliant but of her early days she can recall a great deal. There’s one thrilling sound from her childhood in BC that she has never forgotten — that of the Cowichan tribe braves chanting on their sacred mountain high above the house.
‘A day which begins squinting through the sleet often ends in a still and golden evening’