Charles Ritchie - An Appetite for Life: The Education of a Young Diarist, 1924-1927

ALSO BY CHARLES RITCHIE

The Siren Years
Diplomatic Passport
Storm Signals
My Grandfathers House

Copyright 1977 Charles Ritchie
Convocation Address 2001 The Estate of Charles Ritchie

Originally published in hardcover by Macmillan of Canada 1977
McClelland & Stewart trade paperback edition published 2001
by arrangement with the Estate of Charles Ritchie

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency is an infringement of the copyright law.

National Library of Canada cataloguing in publication data

Ritchie, Charles, 19061995
An appetite for life : the education of a young diarist, 19241927

eISBN: 978-1-55199-677-6

1. Ritchie, Charles, 19061995 Diaries. 2. Diplomats Canada Diaries. I. Title.

FC 561. R 58 A 3 2001 327.710092 C 00-932576- X
F 1034. R 573 A 3 2001

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

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v3.1

To Sylvia

The notebooks containing my old diaries are stacked on dusty, toppling piles in the cellar of the apartment house in which I live. They are not, as they should be, arranged in chronological order (a task I have always shirked). After the appearance of my book The Siren Years, which covered the years 193745, I intended to follow it up with the records of the next decade, and with this object in mind I descended to the cellar in search of those diaries. While pulling notebooks at random from the stacks, I happened to open one much earlier in date than those I was looking for. It was dated September 1924, the beginning of my eighteenth year.

I began to read, and having once started, read on and on. As I did so, an idea struck me. Why not instead of plodding on with my middle-aged diaries go back to the youthful ones? The notion appealed to me, yet I realized the risks. Whatever the shortcomings of the later record, it did deal with the worlds of international politics and diplomacy in which by then I moved. It included anecdotes of the famous and the not so famous. If I continued with its publication, I could offer the reader some measure of historical interest, but if I decided in favour of the early diaries, there would be no supporting props of this kind. The youthful diarist would have to stand on his own two feet. Yet in the end I could not resist giving him a chance. It seemed callous to leave him to rot in the cellar when he was plainly longing to get out and tell all.

However, there are limits to ones tolerance of the adolescent ego. To publish the whole of these diaries would be to flood the reader with a spate of words often repetitious and finally exhausting. So there has had to be a good deal of culling also some telescoping of the material. This has at times involved the joining up of scenes and episodes originally scattered in fragmentary form over a number of entries. Also, for reasons which will become obvious, names of certain persons have had to be changed.

It is with some trepidation that I introduce my earlier self to the reader in the hope that his company may prove enlivening. For, with all his faults and absurdities, he had a great appetite for life, and not least for the comedy of life.

C.R.
Chester, Nova Scotia
June 1977

PART 1

HALIFAX
19241925

19 September 1924.

I spent the morning trying to write a short story. I had written some of it last night, and it seemed to flow along as though I were doing automatic writing. For the first time I thought, I really can write, capering about my room and saying out loud, Im going to be an author! I wanted to tell someone and went down to the library. Mother and Aunt Millie had not gone to bed yet. They were discussing household finances. I listened to them talking for a few minutes and the impulse to tell them dried up. It is just as well, because this morning when I re-read what I had written I was appalled. It is no good, no bloody good at all. The dialogue is like someone trying to mimic who has got the voice and accent just wrong. As for the story, it stands still. Nothing moves forward and the characters are cardboard.

I crumpled the whole thing up and threw it into the wastepaper basket and took out a new sheet of paper, determined to begin again, but I just stared at the blank page for nearly an hour and nothing happened. Not a thought, not a word came. I found myself looking out of the window at the leaves flittering in the breeze at the edge of the lawn. I watched Aunt Millie come out of the house with her shopping bag over her arm, walking slowly out of sight down the drive. What is she thinking about? I wondered; what shes going to buy for dinner, or about making over last summers dress, or is she worrying about Eileens future? She is a mystery, everyone is a mystery. But the characters in my story are not mysteries, they arent people at all.

I thought I might as well go for a walk as sit here staring into space. I took the short-cut past the stables, over the new bridge, across the railway cutting, through the village, and into the park. It was a funny sort of day. There had been fog but it had lifted, and it was neither hot nor cold. The sun just not out, the tops of the pine trees just moving. I went down to the point where you can look out to sea and sat on a bench. There was a liner moving out of the harbour mouth. It seemed to be moving slowly, hardly at all. The next time I looked it had almost disappeared. I thought, Oh, to be on board, doing anything, a stowaway, or swabbing the decks, going anywhere. There must be another place different from this. The whole world cant be the same. But what if it turned out to be? A big raindrop plopped down on my forehead out of the still sky and I turned home. As I walked under the trees in the park the rain came on. I was thinking, I cannot invent. I shall never, never be a novelist. At the same time, I must write. Why? God knows. So that Im left with this diary, this useless, drivelling diary. If that is all I have, I had better get on with it.

So little happens to me that is worth recording. No great adventures or tremendous experiences, or passionate love affairs. I know no famous people whom I can describe for posterity. For instance, what has happened today? You may say, Nothing at all. But something has happened to me. I have given up dreaming of being a great writer. That and nothing else, except that we had fried eggs and bacon for breakfast and Georgina, the maid, broke a coffee cup and Aunt Millie said, Oh, for mercys sake, that girl again. And Mother said to me, When you are on your own and have to look after yourself perhaps youll learn not to throw your clothes in a heap on the floor of the bedroom and just leave them there for someone to pick up. So what am I to write about? I think I will try my hand at describing this house where I live and the people in it. This place is called The Bower and it is on the outskirts of Halifax, Nova Scotia. The tram only goes as far as the corner of Inglis Street, so you have to walk the rest of the way (or we have to, as we have no car). Coming home, you go past the big iron gates at the entrance of Gorsebrook, which is the place adjoining ours, and along beside the stone wall enclosing Gorsebrooks fields and their woods. You turn right beside the dilapidated paling fence enclosing our woods and you come to two squat, square, stone gate-posts and turn into our drive. On the right is the lodge, a little wooden house badly in need of painting, which we let to a family who are behind in the rent. On the left are the barn and the stables where an old Irishman named William Robinson now runs a livery stable and is supposed to look after our furnace in his spare time and when he is sober. The drive winds up on a slight incline under arching trees. On the right there is a meadow sloping down towards the woods. Near the top of the drive you come out onto a square of gravel with the house on one side and lawns and flower beds on the other. The house itself is old, built in 1817, with a Victorian front added later. Its dark-red shingle is overgrown with Virginia creeper. The house seems to slumber away as though nothing had ever disturbed it, but if you go round to the back you get a surprise. Within yards of the kitchen door you are on the edge of a cliff of tawny rock a hundred feet deep; it is the railway cutting. When they put the new railway in it went right through our orchard and so near us that when you see the house from the other side of the cutting it seems almost to be perched on the brink. You can hear the trains rushing and rattling down below and the sound reverberates from the steep rocky sides of the cutting as from the bottom of a canyon. When I was a child and they were still blasting through the solid rock, there would be a siren of warning and crashing dynamite explosions which made the house itself shake. Some people might be bothered by having the cutting so near but it does not worry us in the least, we are so used to it. In fact, I love listening, especially at night when Im in bed, to the hooting of the engines, the ringing of the cow-bells, the jangling of the couplings, and the sound of the mournful whistle as the trains draw out in the distance, so that I picture them tearing along with their lighted windows through the darkness and dwindling away to the edge of sleep.