Introduction

Dick, Winnie, Don and Frank (Owen not born)

My life began on an Alberta farm in the Dirty Thirties. My father, at twenty-six, had made what he called “a rather wrenching move” from the North of England to a raw quarter section of land near Edmonton in the early 1900’s.

My mother Winnie McKitrick was his second wife, his first having died of a stroke six years before I arrived.  I am the middle child of her three boys and a half-brother to two older boys who had left home before the start of the second family.

It was also a late marriage (in those days) for my mother. Her fiancé had been killed in the First World War and she remained a spinster school teacher until she met my dad and married at the age of thirty-two. She was quite clear about the kind of man she would have for a husband. She would not marry a farmer, nor a widower, nor an Englishman (remittance men gave them a bad name).
 I think that the fact that she married all three reflects either my father’s charm or good character, or perhaps both. By the way, I didn’t know what a remittance man was, so my mother explained that wealthy English families would send their soft and spoiled young men to Canada, with a remittance to support them, in the hopes that it would help them make something of themselves. I heard it didn’t always work.


My father was in his fifties at the start of the second family (or ‘second crop’ as he would refer to us with a smile). By this time the farm was in a maintenance mode. Dad had done the hard work of clearing and breaking the land and building up a herd of purebred Holstein cattle and a flock of black-faced Hampshire sheep. He and his wife had also raised two sons and sent them to University. And even before all of this they had opened, and later sold, a general store and post office on the property. But by the time I was growing up Dad was in his sixties and less active. This meant that the paternal role model I had was very different from that of my half-brothers. Unlike them, I was inspired to take it easy through life.

It was a mile and a quarter walk to the one-room brick country schoolhouse where I endured the first eight years of mostly unsupervised schooling. Twenty-five or thirty of us aged six to sixteen, and across nine grades, were confined to old slide-in desks with inkwells on top and book drawers under the seats. I recall spending a good deal of time staring out the big west-facing windows at the ever changing countryside and dreaming of being free.  The many initials carved or scratched on the desk tops made me think that my predecessors were also pretty bored by school.

 My first week at school coincided with the beginning of World War II, making the war years an important influence during the stage of life when I was becoming aware of the world. I expect this period will become an important part of a memoir. Apart from school, life on the farm was idyllic. The summer holidays were especially delicious;  floating makeshift toy boats down the creek, rafting on the slough, climbing trees and collecting birds’ eggs, building a tree hut, and even herding the cows (without having to milk them until I was older).

By the time I got to high school there were school buses taking us rural kids eight miles into Edmonton where some of us did, and some of us didn’t, mix in with the city kids. After high school, and mainly to meet my parents’ expectations, I enrolled as an Agriculture student at the University of Alberta graduating with a BSc (Agric). This was followed by a few years in farm lending, and then a few in agricultural economics research. During this time I was married and became the father of two beautiful daughters, Leanna and Rayna.

My interest in economics led to an MA degree and later two years of post-graduate study at the London School of Economics. After some time as a research associate at the University of Alberta; an economic advisor for the Prairie Credit Union System; and a spell as an independent consultant I became a bit disenchanted with the field of economics. I think it was because my work didn’t seem to make much of a difference to anyone, and therefore wasn’t very satisfying. I now refer to myself as a ‘recovering economist’ because of trying to kick the habit of viewing the world though the distorting lens of economics.

So it was time to make some changes. My marriage of twenty-eight years ended and two years later I moved to Vancouver with a new partner, Myriam, and started a facilitation business. The attraction was that instead of writing reports which may or may not be acted on, we were facilitating organizations of all types to discover their own answers by directly engaging as many of their people as possible. Our company has now phased out this part of our business after providing this service for twenty-seven years.

Although we live and work in South Delta we have maintained our ties to Alberta. Amiscape Woods Lodge is our wilderness retreat on a lake a couple of hours north of Edmonton. Our approximately bimonthly visits provide a continuing source of the kind of rest and rejuvenation that only time in nature can afford.  It is an ideal spot for the creative pursuits of writing, gardening, painting, puttering, and tinkering.

What I propose to do now in this Memoir is share some of my life’s experiences, especially those of my formative years. My father didn’t talk much about his early life when he was alive. He died when I was only twenty-four and still at an egocentric age with little interest in his history. But a few years before he died he penciled twenty-five pages of autobiographical notes in a little blue-cover scribbler. These notes provided information that I either didn’t know or of which I was only vaguely aware. For example, I did not know that he was in the 69^th Cavalry Company of the Sussex Yeomanry during the Boer War. I also had no prior clue to how he felt when his little brother George died at the age of five. His notes provide these things. Because I so value what he wrote, my hope is that what I decide to share will also be of interest to my children and grandchildren. Also, when I relate the odd anecdote from my childhood my daughters typically respond with comments like “You must write that down for us so we can remember it”.

I aspire to assembling a coherent and engaging account of some of the people and events from an earlier time that contributed to who I have become.

 Don Haythorne