Joyce Barkhouse - A Name for Himself. A Biography of Thomas Head Raddall

JOYCE BARKHOUSE

NATURAL HERITAGE BOOKS

TORONTO

Copyright Natural Heritage/Natural History Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, Natural Heritage, P.O. Box 69, Station H, Toronto, Ontario M4C 5H7

Previously published, 1986, by Irwin Publishing Inc.

Canadian Cataloguing In Publication Data

Barkhouse, Joyce, 1913
A name for himself

Rev. ed.

ISBN 0-920474-58-6

1. Raddall, Thomas H., 1903- - Biography.

2. Novelists, Canadian (English) - 20th century - Biography.* I. Title.

PS8535.A33Z58 1990 C813'.54 C90-093639-8 PR9199.3.R33Z58 1990

Every effort has been made to locate and acknowledge the correct copyright owners. Quotations from In My Time, His Majestys Yankees, and Hangmans Beach by Thomas Head Raddall have been used with the permission of the author and The Canadian Publishers, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto.

The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council.

Cover Design: Steve Eby

Cover photo: Thomas Raddall, in his study at the height of his career. Courtesy, Dalhousie University Archives.

Printed and bound in Canada by Imprimerie Gagn Lte

In memory of Fred

If I live through this war I hope to see you graduate at Varsity. In any case take the ideal for the goal, and strive to make a name for yourself.

These were the last words his father wrote to Thomas Raddall, Jr., just before he was killed on the battlefield of Amiens in 1918. Tom was only fourteen years old. He never did graduate from Varsity. He was forced to leave school and go to work at once, to support himself and to help his family. But he never forgot his fathers words.

Today he is known as one of Canadas greatest storytellers.

Born in Hythe, England, Tom moved to Nova Scotia with his family when he was ten years old. His early life was marked by tragedy. A few months before his father was killed, he had lived through the terrible Halifax Explosion of December, 1917. Some tough experiences followed. He became a marine telegrapher at the age of fifteen, and served at sea for more than two years before he was posted to remote Sable Island that desert in the sea, far off the coast of Nova Scotia. He was there when he had his first short story published, at the age of eighteen a ghost story called The Singing Frenchman.

Disenchanted with the life of a telegrapher, Tom took a business course in Halifax, and bought himself an old typewriter. He was working as bookkeeper for a paper mill in Liverpool, Nova Scotia, when he took the unprecedented step of giving up his nine-to-five job to devote himself, full time, to writing.

At that time no Canadian author of fiction had been able to earn even a subsistence income. Tom had a wife and two small children to support. But Tom dared, and he succeeded. This is the story of his courage, his suffering, and his successes. Out of the loneliness and despair of his stay on Sable Island, eventually he wrote one of his greatest novels, The Nymph and the Lamp.

Three times winner of the Governor Generals award for literature, Dr. Thomas Head Raddall has received almost every honour Canada can bestow on an author. His stories are read in countries all over the world. He has made a name for himself.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author is deeply grateful to Dr. Thomas Head Raddall for his generosity and patience in helping to prepare this brief story of his life. Special thanks also to Dr. Charles Armour, University Archivist, Dalhousie University.

To fourteen-year-old Thomas Raddall the fateful morning of the sixth of December, 1917, began like any other day. He sat down to a breakfast of hot oatmeal porridge with his mother and his little sister, Winifred. The baby, Hilda, was in her high chair and his older sister, Nellie, was upstairs in bed with a bad cold. Toms father was somewhere in Europe on the battlefront fighting in the World War which, it was said, would end all wars.

The family could not know that in Halifax Harbour, a short distance away, two ships were rapidly approaching each other on a deadly collision course. The incoming French freighter Mont Blanc was a floating munitions magazine packed below decks with picric acid and TNT, the most powerful explosives then known. Because of human error she was about to be rammed by a Belgian relief ship, the IMO, and would explode in a blast resulting in instant death and destruction never equalled on earth until many years later when an atomic bomb was deliberately dropped on Hiroshima.

A few minutes before nine oclock Thomas Raddall picked up his books and walked down the street to nearby Chebucto School. He was warmly dressed because there was a war-time shortage of fuel in the city and the janitor was under orders to bank the fire in the coal furnace every night. Only the oldest students in the top class, Grade Nine, had to attend at the usual hour. All the others came at ten oclock, when the classrooms were warmer.

(Courtesy Dalhousie University Archives, Thomas Raddall Papers)

Tom was at this school on Chebucto Road when the Halifax Explosion occurred.

Thomas was not fond of school but he liked his teacher, the headmaster, Mr. Marshall known as Old Gander because of his long skinny neck and bald head. He had a thick white moustache and intelligent blue eyes shaded by bushy eyebrows. Tom had just flung his books on his desk and taken his seat when Mr. Marshall rapped out,

Attention!

This was the command for all of the students to stand by their desks in military fashion, eyes front.

Let us sing the morning hymn, said Mr. Marshall, and Tom joined in lustily.

Awake my soul and with the sun

Thy daily stage of duty run,

Be seated, said the teacher, at the end of the verse, and at that moment the Mont Blanc exploded.

Many years later Thomas Raddall described what happened:

we felt two distinct shocks. The first was a sort of earthquake in which the floor seemed to rise and drop. A few seconds later the air blast smote us. In the same order there were two tremendous noises, first a deep grumble from the ground and then an ear-splitting bang It was like being shaken by a maniac giant with one fist and then slammed on your head with the other. I was able to move and talk rationally, but the concussion left me in a dazed state for many hours, during which I regarded strange and horrible sights as calmly as if they happened every day.

The effects in the classroom were swift and destructive. The windows vanished Behind my row of desks a door-glass tipped forward, shot horizontally over our heads, and sliced deeply into the wall in front of us The big clock on the wall just missed the headmaster and shattered on his desk. All the plaster sprang off the walls in large and small chunks, and filled the room with a fog of white dust. We jumped to our feet, staring at each other. One girl screamed (her cheek was cut from mouth to ear), For a few seconds we stood like a lot of powdered clowns with badly applied daubs of red paint here and there; then with the instinct born of routine fire-practice the boys and girls dived through their cloakrooms, snatching coats and headgear off the hooks or off the floor and clattering away downstairs to run home.